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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE CHURCH IN MODERN 
SOCIETY 



BY 



JULIUS H. WARD 



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OCT 1 1889 C 

BOSTON ANI> NtW^RK 
HOUGHTON/MTFFETlSrAND COMPANY 

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1889 



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Copyright, 1889, 
By JULIUS H. WARD. 

All rights reserved. 



The Libkary 

of Congress 



WASHINGTON 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 



To 

HENRY CODMAN POTTER 

9&!jftop of Jfrcto gorfc 

IN WHOSE EPISCOPATE 

THE CHURCH IS ENTERING INTO ITS PROPER RELATIONS 
WITH MODERN SOCIETY 

THIS VOLUME 

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 



PREFACE. 



PHIS book is intended for the whole 
-*• Christian family in this country. The 
comparative study of the truths contained 
but imperfectly expressed in the terms of 
different creeds reveals larger agreements 
than men have willingly allowed ; and 
when Christianity is interpreted helpfully 
and constructively in the light of these 
agreements, the Church of Christ exerts 
the organic influence in the social life 
which the national government exerts in 
the political and economic life of the peo- 
ple. The collective church has this large 
and comprehensive work to do, and the 
aim of these pages is to suggest a way in 
which it may be done. 

Brookline, Mass., October 2, i< 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

/. Permanent Institutions ...... / 

//. Church Development before the Reformation 13 

III. The Church in Modern Life ..... 25 

IV. The Church in Disintegration . . . . 38 
V. The Church in the World 50 

VI. The Inclusive Church ....... 69 

VII. The Spiritual Method of the Church . . 9/ 

VIII. The Church in the Family no 

IX. The Church among the People . . • . 1 34 

X The Church in the Nation 154 

XL Constructive Unity in Religious Forces . 181 

XII. Unity through Working Agreements . . 210 



THE CHURCH IN MODERN 
SOCIETY. 



CHAPTER I. 

Permanent Institutions. 

HP HE order of the social world begins 
■*■ with the family. At first, the com- 
munity was the family magnified by its 
growing relationships. The church was 
the family enlarged in a spiritual direction. 
The earliest human society grew out of the 
fundamental principles and the historical 
development of these institutions. They 
represent, under varying forms, the earliest 
organization of life, and are capable of 
that modification in growth by which the 
seed is traced in its expansion and fruit. 
They are the beginnings of primitive so- 
ciety, the constituent and permanent ele- 



2 The Church in Modern Society. 

ments of all society. Under every modi- 
fication which history records, these three 
institutions have retained their identity 
and exerted their legitimate and intended 
influence. They are divine in their origin 
and purpose, in the sense that all life is 
said to be divine. They are found in the 
earliest gathering of men together, and 
are structural in the social and spiritual 
economy of the race. The personal man, 
after Adam, has his root in the family ; the 
political condition grows out of the neces- 
sity for order when men are living in com- 
munity ; the spiritual life of men, however 
personal in its inward intention toward 
God, finds expression in an institutional 
order which is included in the word Church. 
In the earliest Hebrew times the family, 
the community, and the church had their 
essential potency and meaning in a single 
household. The functions of each insti- 
tution existed in distinct germs, but were 
often exercised by one and the same per- 
son ; and when they were separated, it was 



Permanent Institutions. 3 

not felt that their relative bearing had 
been changed. Humanity was a unit 
under a threefold manifestation, and this 
was not more apparent in the Hebrew de- 
velopment, of which the record has been 
definitely preserved, than in the Gentile 
developments which existed side by side 
with that of the Hebrews. It is one of 
the structural features of human history, 
that, under all governments and among all 
races, the family, the body politic, and the 
ecclesiastical order have found their places. 
With great changes and modifications they 
have constantly retained their prevailing 
types, whether the light of God's presence 
in the world has been clearly recognized, 
as among the Hebrews, or partially hidden 
under superstitions and corruptions, as 
among the rival race-growths of the East. 
It deepens the sense of continuous order 
and of the constant unfolding of the life 
toward freedom to find that these institu- 
tions, which are fundamental in human 
society, do not change in their essential 



4 The Church in Modern Society. 

character as the centuries go by. They 
are modified by the movements in the 
affairs of men, but they are the same in 
structure that they have ever been. It is 
the tendency of the time to see only the 
individual existence, to regard life in piece- 
meal, to secure the wellbeing of one man. 
Democratic society is a mass of units, and 
the struggle is toward the points where 
one man shall prevail ; but the moment a 
general average is reached in the personal 
or political or ecclesiastical life, it is found 
that the ancient institutions of the world 
reappear and claim their own. They re- 
appear, not singly, but together. If the 
church is disregarded, the state loses its 
tone and the family its complementary sup- 
port. If the state is enfeebled, the church 
struggles as with an unnatural burden, and 
the personal education of the family through 
the state is interfered with. If the family 
life is neglected, the state is not reenforced 
with good citizens, and the church is com- 
paratively powerless. The great changes 



Permanent Institutions. 5 

in history are connected with the rise and 
fall of these institutions. They are so 
closely related that society is touched as a 
whole whenever either of them is interfered 
with. This is freely acknowledged, but in 
the practical operation of institutions upon 
individual life it is often disregarded. The 
family is allowed to do its work without 
this assistance of the church ; the church 
and the state are neutral or hostile ; each 
pursues its own way as if it had nothing to 
do with the other. As there is in every 
well-ordered life an unrealized ideal to 
which the imagination appeals for the en- 
thusiasm and the courage that carry one 
through the rough passages of experience, 
so there is a theory of the relation of divine 
institutions to one another which is neces- 
sary to the harmonious and simultaneous 
development of all the interests of human 
society ; and it is in and through their 
essential unity and interdependence that 
social and spiritual advancement are to be 
reached. 



6 The Church in Modern Society. 

The solidarity of human forces is a belief 
that is taught by a study of the processes 
of history. This is not always brought out 
by the historian. The progress of the 
state has usually been the theme of the 
historical writer, while its educational, 
social, and ethical life have been treated as 
if they did not exist. Buckle was among the 
first in our own day to enlarge the historical 
view, and the sociological studies of later 
date have brought within the range of his- 
torical writers the sum of the influences 
that have controlled the life of the people 
for a given period. History can no longer 
be the tracing of a single dominant idea in 
its process of development. It must be 
the tracing of the combined working ideas 
of the world as they have influenced so- 
ciety, and these working ideas are found 
in the central institutions that have pre- 
vailed from the beginning. They have not 
always had equally free play ; but what has 
been realized in the social development of 
other ages has come, not through the 



Permanent Institutions. 7 

family education and the personal life of 
the individual alone, not through the con- 
trol of the state in the form of personal 
despotism alone, not as a result of the 
ethical development through which the 
higher beliefs of men have modified human 
action, but through their combined yet 
often unequal action upon mankind. The 
movement of the world has been slow, 
infinitely slow, but it has been a solid 
movement toward human freedom. This 
freedom is not the predominance of any 
one idea or element ; it has been the fruit 
of their combined energy in lifting man up 
to a higher ideal of society. Exclusively 
regarded on the ecclesiastical side, it has 
been the realization of the kingdom of God 
in the world ; regarded in the light of 
common human experience, it has made 
mankind sharers in the redemptive agencies 
of a power that works for righteousness in 
society at large and is called the Church 
of Christ. The freedom that exists in the 
world to-day is not physical, social, ethical, 



8 The Church in Modern Society. 

or spiritual so much as it is the enthrone- 
ment of life upon a higher plane. It is the 
realization of the meaning of the City of 
God among the citizens of the world. It 
is the enlargement of life through the 
family, the state, and the church, in their 
combined influence upon the individual 
man, and in the direction which they give 
to society. There has been a growth in 
modern life which has been described as 
the development of individual liberty. 
The family, working freely, has been the 
home of the citizen, of the state, and of 
the earthly City of God, but the combined 
operation of church and state was for 
many centuries to suppress the individual 
in order to magnify the two institutions 
which have been employed to build up his 
life in freedom. The growth of modern 
society has been in the direction of the 
emancipation of the individual at the ex- 
pense of both the state and the church. 
The problem to-day is to restore the 
family, the state, and the church to their 



Permanent Institutions. g 

natural functions as central institutions 
for the organization, protection, and guid- 
ance of human life. The freedom of the 
individual has been secured through a 
process of evolution in which humanity- 
has passed from childhood to maturity. 
The voice of the whole people is to-day 
that voice of God which was once thought 
to be heard in the commands of the king. 
The state in America and England has the 
precedence of the family and the church 
in the direction of society, and the work 
before the people is to place the church 
and the family on an equal footing with 
the state. The gradual transfer of au- 
thority from the head of the tribe to the 
people of the tribe, — the transfer of the 
rule from Abraham to the children of 
Israel, — is the description of the process 
that has culminated in the democratic 
commonwealth ; but this large and free 
political and social existence is endangered 
in two directions. It is accompanied by 
the diminished influence of the family and 



io The Church in Modern Society. 

by the frequent ignoring of the ethical and 
spiritual influence of the kingdom of God. 
They exist ; but their organic character, the 
part they play as institutions in the mould- 
ing and elevation of individual life, is 
weakened by a mistaken conception of the 
basis upon which social and political free- 
dom rest. The family and the church need 
to be restored to the place which the state, 
to a certain extent, holds in public opinion. 
They are the natural supporters of the 
state. The strength of our political life is 
in the industrial, social, and spiritual edu- 
cation of the people. The public school 
stands midway between the family and the 
church, and educates the people the best 
when both of these institutions inspire its 
work. 

The problem at any period in the history 
of the world has been only different in 
form from that which is before the Amer- 
ican people. The problem to-day is the 
relation of the three fundamental insti- 
tutions, which have always expressed the 



Permanent Institutions. u 

fullness of human and divine agency among 
men, to the necessities of modern society. 
Columbus discovered what he called the 
new world, and modern society almost had 
its beginning with that event. People 
who are here to-day find themselves in a 
world which is as new to its past as the 
world which Columbus first saw was new to 
his fellow-Europeans to whom he carried 
the fact of his discovery. There is a new 
feeling about the things which have been 
accepted. The scientific method takes 
nothing for granted, and the historical 
method slowly satisfies those who feel that 
the foundations of social and spiritual life 
are to be laid anew. The enlargement of 
existence, and the presence of forces which 
are changing the key-note from hour to 
hour, have given the impression that the 
institutional life of men is to be begun 
anew ; and in this conviction it is felt that 
the family and the church are not the 
important factors that they have shown 
themselves to be in history. It is from 



12 The Church in Modern Society. 

this point of view that it is wise to study 
our social development. What are the 
conservative and constructive agencies 
which are to control and guide the miscel- 
laneous life of the hour ? How is the old 
to be adjusted to the new? How shall 
the family preserve its integrity? How 
shall the state maintain its freedom ? How 
shall the church be the family of God 
among the people? Civil society is the 
field in which these ancient and permanent 
institutions are to find their adjustment to 
the working life of the people, and the 
Church of Christ has the duty of entering 
this field and making fresh conquests for 
God and humanity. 




CHAPTER II. 

The Church before the Reformation. 

r*HE Church of Christ is singled out 
** in history as the institution which in 
its various forms has contributed most to 
the direction of the world. It has ruled 
in human affairs for two reasons : it has 
claimed that the future life is determined 
by one's present conduct, and it has stood 
for the righteousness that is necessary 
alike in the family and in the state, if so- 
ciety is to discharge its highest ethical 
functions. It has had a supernatural sanc- 
tion, and it has proved itself the best prac- 
tical scheme for the regulation of conduct. 
This twofold appeal to men always existed 
and must be as operative in the future 
as in the past. It is, in effect, a twofold 
sanction. Much has been naturally made 
of the divine authority of Christianity, and 



j 4 The Church in Modern Society. 

of the church as the organized form of 
society through which its principles have 
been transmitted and its benefits secured, 
— too much has perhaps been made to 
keep the harmony that should subsist 
between its three permanent factors. It 
is an ideal state of society where the divine 
sanction is the supreme reality, and where 
religious motives universally prevail. The 
actual state of things in the world is the 
ordering of life as conditioned by the two 
motives of future happiness and present 
convenience. The church, or what has 
stood in the place of the church, has had 
in earlier ages the sanction of divine au- 
thority more compactly asserted and main- 
tained than it is insisted on now. The 
Jewish Church was essentially a theocracy 
in which every son of Israel had his im- 
mediate relation to God. Every heathen 
substitute for the church has aimed to give 
a divine sanction to the operations of life. 
The pure theism of the early religions was 
immensely expanded in its human relation- 



The Church before the Reformation. 15 

ships by the advent of Christ, who revealed 
the brightness of God's glory and was the 
express image of his person. It was the 
Christ who gave all the old religions a new 
meaning, as if the dim visions had suddenly 
burst out into open day. It was the effect 
of the Incarnation that the divine authority 
of Christianity was most emphasized at its 
beginning, but it was greatly assisted in 
its identifications with human life by the 
embodiment of Christian principles in prac- 
tical conduct. The church took the shape 
in the world which Christ is believed to 
have intended ; and the tracing of the form 
which it assumed through successive gen- 
erations, in the processes of history, is the 
record of its contact with civilization, and 
of the way in which the one has acted and 
reacted upon the other. 

The history of the church has usually 
been written as if it were the only divine 
institution in the world. It has been re- 
garded as the only leaven of society. The 
family and the state have been regarded as 



1 6 The Church in Modern Society. 

institutions which perpetuate corruption, 
while the church alone keeps society pure 
and maintains the integrity of the social and 
the political order. The mistake that has 
been made is in their separation, in urging 
the claims of the family and the state as 
infinitely lower than that of the church. 
It was natural to make this mistake, be- 
cause the church is concerned with two 
worlds, the one that is and the one that is 
in process of being. It grew out of the 
undue insistence upon the authoritative 
sanction of the church as a divine insti- 
tution and of the conviction that a man's 
spiritual interests exceed in importance 
his interests as a member of society. The 
larger principle is expanded in the say- 
ing, " He that loseth his life for My sake 
shall find it." But there has ever been, 
and there is to-day, the purely ecclesiastical 
way of looking at the church, — exalting its 
organization, its authority, its succession 
of ministers, its traditional faith, the va- 
lidity of its sacraments, as if its virtue 



The Church before the Reformation, ij 

was in these apart from their relation to 
men in the form of spiritual ministrations. 
In one quarter the ecclesiastical authority- 
has been exalted into a fetich ; in another, 
dogmas have taken on doctrinaire forms 
until the things insisted on as necessary 
to salvation often acquire the character of 
theological fictions. It is a long way to 
clearness of view when the supernatural 
neither in ministrations nor in belief takes 
a place that is out of harmony with the 
other factors of human development. The 
supernatural is not to be denied in the 
revelation of the truth to the human con- 
sciousness, nor in the Personality of our 
Lord ; but the supernatural element in the 
earlier history of our religion has been di- 
minished in its power to move life to-day, 
and the purpose of improving humanity 
has come more and more into view. It is 
comparatively easy to assume much about 
the spiritual, or divine, authority of the 
church, and to regard any other sanctions 
of a working Christianity as unworthy of 



1 8 The Church in Modern Society. 

attention ; and here ardent religionists have 
often gone beyond their limits. And for 
this reason there has arisen a repulsion 
from spiritual authority which has largely 
entered into the judgments of men. The 
sanction of the church which carries most 
weight with thoughtful persons is its prac- 
tical efficiency as one of the working fac- 
tors of society. It is better understood 
and appreciated as a reality than as a 
divine power. As one of the perma- 
nent elements that enter into the contin- 
uous life of humanity, it no more loses 
its higher spiritual character when it is 
mainly valued for its human uses, than the 
family and the state are shorn of their 
divine authority when they are regarded 
only with reference to the ends which they 
serve. Each depends upon the other for 
functions which impart strength to society, 
and each has its sanction in its necessity 
to the welfare of humanity. The church 
has always maintained, along with the 
assertion of its divine character, close re- 



The Church before the Reformation, ig 

lations with the state and with the family. 
It has worked through both, and has itself 
been shaped and modified by both. In 
the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations, 
the family and the state were overshad- 
owed by the theocracy, but they were still 
the two arms by which the Hebrew Church 
built up life within the Jewish nation and 
sustained social and political order. If it 
transcended the limits which would be 
allowed to-day, it did no harm where life 
was still narrowed to the knowledge and 
doing of few things. At the beginning 
of the Christian dispensation, Christianity 
stood outside of the world and asked to 
be admitted. Its claims to be listened to 
had to be vouched for. The family and 
the state, as permanent factors of society, 
had been organized without its sanction, 
though not without an institution intended 
to serve its purpose, and did not feel the 
need of its assistance ; and yet there was 
the vacant place in the social order which 
the religious element in neither Greek nor 



20 The Church in Modern Society. 

Roman civilization could fill, and which 
Christianity supplied with wonderful ra- 
pidity when it gained leverage in the world 
and began to control the lives of men. 
Though it entered society through the 
members of Caesars household, it did not 
stop until it had ascended Caesar's throne. 
The early history of Christianity is the 
record of a continuous conflict between 
the social and spiritual forces in each gen- 
eration. The natural law of the family 
and of the state is not in accord with the 
Christian ideal of what these institutions 
should be. The church with its credentials 
in its hands is forcing its way to the head 
of civilization, and is engaged in recon- 
structing the social and religious beliefs 
of men at every step. It is not surprising 
that paganism colored Christianity, that 
the pagan idea of the family and the state 
found recognition in the church, and that, 
in the absence of the individual freedom 
of modern life, the family should become 
shriveled and the monarchical element in 



The Church before the Reformation. 21 

the state should gain the ascendancy even 
in the church. The relation was too close 
for the results to be otherwise. The pict- 
ure of apostolic Christianity in its sim- 
plicity, in its freshness, in its beauty, is 
imperfectly realized after the church has 
entered upon its world-career and under- 
takes to maintain spiritual purposes with 
carnal weapons. Not that families are not 
Christians, or that the state is not under 
spiritual control ; but the freedom of each 
is lost through a form of society in which 
liberty of action for the individual has not 
been secured. When the church has con- 
trol, it is too often Caesar's hand that 
carries the pastoral staff, and the social 
conditions are unfavorable for the natural 
action of Christian principles. It is diffi- 
cult to see the situation as it really was, 
because the materials for its reconstruc 
tion have been overweighted and put out 
of sight by a purely ecclesiastical view 
of Christianity, and because the church, 
when it gained through the Papacy the 



22 The Church in Modern Society. 

control of western civilization, had joined 
hand in hand with elements that carried 
it far away from its free and natural in- 
fluence upon society. It is easy to infer 
that, with Christianity in the form of des- 
potic authority, and with the integrity of 
the Christian family constantly threatened 
by monachism and the living in commu- 
nities, the free and natural development of 
human society in its distinctive elements 
was greatly interfered with up to the time 
of the Reformation. What the church 
accomplished was the holding of vital 
truth and the maintenance of its heredi- 
tary and apostolic organization ; it failed 
because it absorbed into itself the func- 
tions which belong to the state, and took 
its tone too much from the secular power. 
The family was ignored. The individual 
was felt neither in the church nor in the 
state as a personal element. The history 
of those times makes much of individuals, 
but they were persons bent upon working 
through the church or the state for per- 



The Church before the Reformation. 23 

sonal ends, and do not fairly represent the 
free and natural action of institutions upon 
society. 

One needs to study history with large 
sympathies for the imperfect development 
of great and fundamental ideas, if he is not 
to lose his faith in the divine movement 
of the world. The two institutions which 
should have advanced in peace and unity 
from the beginning — the church and 
the state — have been at war with one 
another since the conversion of Con- 
stantine, chiefly because the prerogative 
of the church in spiritual affairs had been 
claimed as its right in secular life, and in 
this conflict the spiritual movement of the 
world had its opportunity constantly de- 
layed. The progress of society satisfies 
no theorist ; but in a large view of the 
order of events, there is, if not the ideal 
result, such an advance, or such an open- 
ing of new features, that the working 
hopes of humanity are encouraged and 
maintained. And this is the outcome of 



24 The Church in Modern Society. 

the period during which the Christian 
Church lived through the transition from 
the ancient world to modern life. You 
can trace, if you will, beneath the enor- 
mous mass of details, the imperfect and 
restrained operation of the family, the 
state, and the church, — none of them 
free, none of them willing to trust the 
others, yet each compelled to accept some 
modus vivendi and wait for better days. 




CHAPTER III. 

The Church in Modern Life. 

r I ^HE modern world begins with the 
-*• Reformation, with the outburst of 
intellectual and spiritual life that had 
long been waiting its opportunity. The 
Reformation itself was a twofold move- 
ment : it took the direction of spiritual 
independence, but it was quite as dis- 
tinctly political as it was spiritual. The 
world had outgrown the church's interpre- 
tation of it and insisted that the church 
should allow a larger and different expan- 
sion of the social and spiritual needs of 
men. The state felt the necessity of as- 
serting its independence of the church. 
The original institutions of society were 
making their strongest efforts since the 
primitive davs to give an increased free- 



26 The Church in Modern Society. 

dom to individual life. The consciousness 
of the civilized world was thoroughly 
awakened ; but the interest in the family, 
which had long been choked by its more 
powerful rivals, the church and the state, 
was not aroused in the same degree. The 
contest of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries was mainly the struggle between 
the church and the state to establish the 
precedence of the one over the other. 
Sometimes the one led, sometimes the 
other, but the effort was always an attempt 
to reach a result for which the world was 
not quite prepared. A study of the his- 
tory of the collective church since the 
Reformation reveals this widening of the 
too close embrace of the church and state 
during the Middle Ages, and the assertion 
of a freer, more expansive, more truly in- 
dividual life, which has made a sphere for 
itself in civil society. In other ages man 
was a member of the family, of the state, 
of the church, and expressed his individ- 
uality through this membership ; but since 



The Church in Modern Life. 2j 

the Reformation he has more and more 
asserted his personality, his conscious self- 
existence, his right to think for himself. 
It is this largeness and freedom of move- 
ment which is specially expressed by the 
modern meaning of the term civil society. 
This was not unknown to the Greeks, and 
before the Reformation it existed where- 
ever the people had gained industrial or 
commercial freedom ; but so soon as men 
began to enter into a larger sense of their 
individual rights, they sought a common 
sphere in which to exercise them, and civil 
society is this sphere in modern life. So- 
ciety has been mainly dominated since the 
Reformation by hostility to institutions 
which fetter one's personality and restrict 
his freedom. A large number of the re- 
ligious movements that grew out of the 
Reformation made this principle the basis 
of opposing the institutional order of so- 
ciety and of gaining larger liberty for the 
individual. The political parties in the 
state have proceeded mainly upon the 



28 The Church in Modern Society. 

same idea. It has been difficult to main- 
tain the principle that society is based 
upon permanent institutions. Not to mul- 
tiply illustrations, and confining attention 
to the church alone, there has been a wide 
departure from that intense spirit of organ- 
ization that pervaded every element of so- 
ciety in the Middle Ages, and protected, 
while it restricted, the movements of men. 
The individual man has been determined 
to have his own way in all things, and 
the aggregate of the life of the people has 
brought the state and the church alike to 
a point where their permanent relations to 
the common welfare are often overlooked 
by the people at large. There has been an 
entire revolution since Wycliffe breathed 
the spirit of a Christian freeman into the 
church life of England, and Luther spoke 
out of his inner consciousness in Ger- 
many. 

It is necessary to give this point a 
larger statement than the simple noting of 
the fact, because it covers the whole 



The Church in Modern Life. 2g 

ground of the modern church. Political 
and religious movements have been closely 
allied in the history of mankind. This is 
as true of the ancient as of the modern 
world. The tendency in both church and 
state for the last three centuries has been 
strongly toward individual liberty, and the 
drift in religion has been toward a demo- 
cratic church in a free nation. The 
authority of institutions as privileged or- 
ders is now constantly denied, and there 
is a profound distrust of whatever is 
weighted by traditions. There is a view of 
life that justifies these radical positions. 
You cannot measure modern life by the 
rules that fitted an entirely different state 
of society. The old life of the world must 
cast off its ancient habit if it is to meet 
the conditions of the new day, and this is 
what democratic society has done in the 
last century and is doing in this ; but 
while the surface movement has been of 
this sort, there has been a far different 
movement beneath the visible order. So- 



jo The Church in Modern Society. 

ciety thrives and survives like the strong 
oak of the pasture because it strikes its 
root deep down into life. It cannot exist 
without the economic laws or the institu- 
tional order. The instincts of nature and 
the dictates of right reason alike preserve 
the conditions by which the life of men is 
dependent upon permanent organizations. 
It is here that the conservative view of 
society justifies itself and institutions are 
seen in their bearing upon personal char- 
acter. There must be a political check 
upon pure democracy, if government is 
not to drift into anarchy. There must be 
an ecclesiastical check upon pure volun- 
taryism in religion, if the church is not to 
lose its title to authority and reverence 
among men. 

The influence of the Reformation is 
here deeply felt. The whole output of 
modern life has been the assertion of a 
principle which is destructive to the inte- 
grity of social order, and yet it is this 
principle of order which is perhaps more 



The Church in Modern Life. 31 

precious than any other in the estimation 
of men. The material and personal gains 
of life spring from the incentives that come 
to one and act as spurs to the powers 
within him ; but they fail to make the most 
of a man, unless, as the head of a family, 
as a citizen, and as a servant of God, he 
is in his place in the institutions which 
have been organized in the world for the 
preservation and purification of society. 
The weakness of modern life is in its 
severance from the permanent sources of 
power, which are expressed in family edu- 
cation, in intelligent citizenship, and in the 
Christian idea of character. There can be 
no substitute for these in any form of so- 
ciety, and the danger in the free develop- 
ment of present life is that what is per- 
manent in the ordering of society shall be 
overshadowed by individual theory and 
experiment. The family is not sufficiently 
developed ; the tendency of the church 
is to become a club-house ; the state is 
the prey of politicians ; the church cannot 



j?2 The Church in Modern Society. 

work freely and to advantage unless the 
family and the state are in harmony with 
its purpose ; and it is in reaching out to a 
reconciliation between what is permanent 
and what is experimental that the spiritual 
regeneration of society is to find its ful- 
fillment. This is the task that is before 
the Christian Church in every nationality 
where it has ancient or recent foothold. 
It is as imperative, in its demands, in the 
older civilization as in the new. It is to 
become a working factor in free society, 
not supreme as in the Middle Ages, not 
overborne by the state as often during the 
last two centuries in England and in Con- 
tinental Europe, not an incipient and per- 
mitted power as in the first Christian days, 
but gaining the consent of the best minds 
and leading the thought of the world, be- 
cause it teaches and preserves the tradi- 
tions of the past and expresses the free 
convictions of men, endowed with liberty, 
in such a union that the continuous order 
of Christian thought is transmitted, with 



The Church in Modern Life. 33 

its full power to sustain and guide the ex- 
pansive and intensive life of the individual 
man. 

The modern church in the United States 
must first be studied in its historical de- 
velopment. The religion of this country 
has been characterized as "a common- 
wealth of sects. ,, The American colonies 
represented the various dissenters of the 
German and English reformations, no less 
than the English and Roman parts of the 
historical church ; and with all the attempts 
to establish a state religion in the different 
provinces, the result was a formal separation 
of the church from the state, whose union, 
under varying relations in Christian history, 
has been the chief source of contention at 
the great centres of civilization. But there 
has never been in America an authorized 
form of religion. One ecclesiastical body 
has ruled in one section, another in another ; 
but universal consent has been given to 
none. The church has been in the con- 
dition of organized schism from the begin- 



34 The Church in Modern Society. 

ning. The unity has not been that of 
creed or polity, but the unity of baptism 
into the body of Christ. The principle of 
the Reformation, that the church is the 
product of a consensus of opinion gathered 
from the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures, 
has given one sect as good authority as 
another, and each one has struggled to 
obtain the largest following possible. Even 
the historical churches, like the English 
and the Roman, and possibly the Moravian, 
have stood upon the same footing in the 
thought of the people. The effect has 
been, that, while society was controlled by 
the rigid views of the reigning sect, there 
has been an outward conformity to reli- 
gious institutions ; but when the ecclesias- 
tical regime lost its hold upon the com- 
munity, the church, so called, stood only 
for an idea, an opinion, not for institutional 
order, not for social construction, not for 
a conception of God's relation to the world, 
which is coextensive with the active com- 
munity and with the whole of humanity. 



The Church in Modern Life. 35 

The church in America to-day resembles 
the English colonies in this country in 
their conscious lack of power to organize 
society upon a basis that included the 
interests of all the people. Political neces- 
sity, after the Revolution, constantly aided 
by the efforts of statesmen, from Hamil- 
ton to Webster, at length rooted in the 
thoughts of men the idea of nationality, 
and the country now feels the fructifying 
vitality of the nation as a political institu- 
tion ; but no such unity of thought and ac- 
tion has been reached in the organization 
of our ecclesiastical life. The great defect 
of the German Reformation — that it or- 
ganized society, not by expanding the ex- 
isting church (as was the case, to a degree, 
in England) to the dimensions of the in- 
creased meaning of life to the individual, 
but by breaking loose from the church to 
create new organizations to do the work 
that could have best been done by reform- 
ing agencies within, which were partially 
secured in the Council of Trent, and might 



36 The Church in Modern Society. 

have been vastly better secured if Luther 
and his companions had been present at 
its deliberations — has been multiplied 
until it is the existing hindrance and ob- 
stacle of Christianity in every American 
town and village. The defect is in the 
inadequacy of the thing that exists in the 
place of the church to control the spiritual 
life of the whole people ; and until an 
organization is reached which brings to- 
gether all Christian agencies in a given 
community under an administration that 
represents ecclesiastical economy and the 
true conservation of forces, our religious 
societies, of all names, will continue to 
fail, as they have heretofore failed, to do 
for the community what they aim to do 
for the individual. The existing organi- 
zations do not express the power of the 
working church of primitive days in our 
industrial, social, and ethical life. Christ 
is not acknowledged in his place in the 
institutions which God has planted in the 
world for the preservation and purification 



The Church in Modern Life. 57 

of society. The weakness of modern life 
is in its severance from the natural strength 
that comes from the family education, from 
an intelligent citizenship, and from the 
Christian idea of character. There can be 
no substitute for these fundamental and 
permanent forms and institutions. 

The survey of our American denomina- 
tional development from this point of view 
leads to instructive conclusions. 




CHAPTER IV. 

The Church in Disintegration. 

njHHE chief characteristic of the church 
-*• in the Middle Ages was that it in- 
cluded the industrial, social, and political 
interests of the community under spiritual 
direction. The life of the period was far 
less expansive than the same life is at the 
present day, but the interests to a degree 
were the same which they are now. The 
church by special legislation and parochial 
provision met the common necessities of 
the community without going outside of it- 
self. The place of the collective Christian 
organizations in democratic society to-day 
is in the strongest possible contrast with 
their rank in the old institutional order. 
The special agencies which the church once 
controlled are now largely beyond its pale, 
and are mostly without religious direction. 



The Church in Disintegration. 39 

The church has parted with its social 
jurisdiction. The hospitals, the provident 
societies, the relief associations, the friendly 
orders, the reformation of criminals, are 
more often outside of the Christian churches 
than under their control If the church is 
still associated with the state in this work, 
it is as one of the agencies in a field 
which in monastic England and in the 
old Gallic Church was wholly within the 
confines of ecclesiastical authority. The 
increase of the work of this sort is due to 
the great and universal development of 
individual power in modern society. The 
church has not kept pace with this de- 
velopment. The Roman communion has 
intended to do this ; the Anglican body 
has kept it in view ; the different Prot- 
estant organizations have maintained the 
theory that nothing which concerns the 
life of society is outside of the scope of 
Christian treatment ; the view of social order 
in the Middle Ages is still substantially held 
in theory ; but it is seldom that the Chris- 



40 The Church in Modern Society. 

tian Church is found dealing to-day in a 
large and organic way with the benevolent, 
educational, or social interests of the com- 
munity. The life of men has come to be 
so much outside of the ecclesiastical en- 
vironment that the world has pushed the 
church out of its old centre, and built up 
all sorts of organizations to do its work of 
reformation and renewal. It is difficult to 
realize that the church was ever anything 
more than it is in our American towns 
at the present day; and yet even in our 
cherished localities, the attempt was made 
hardly more than two centuries ago to 
organize the community on such an eccle- 
siastical basis that the spiritual power 
should have the supremacy in all depart- 
ments of life. It was the attempt to make 
the church autocratic by taking away 
the freedom of the individual in a com- 
munity where the people were politically 
the makers of the state, and the individual 
was the social unit. 

It was not a long step to a revolt from 



The Church in Disintegration. 41 

this order of things, and, when it came, it 
meant the defeat of the collective church 
in the element of social power. All Prot- 
estant bodies since the Reformation have 
felt the influence of the revolt of the in- 
dividual from obedience to religious rule. 
The harmony between social and spiritual 
order on the one side and the liberty of 
the individual as a member of society on 
the other has not been cultivated. The 
Christian societies lost their central place 
when they broke away from the national 
church or the Roman obedience, in the 
old world ; and in the new, the collective 
church, though it began in England as the 
ruler of society, was so arbitrary in its 
rulings that it interfered with social and 
personal liberty and could not be toler- 
ated. It did not allow free scope to the 
individual under the general direction of 
Christian institutions. The result was 
that at an early day the line was drawn 
between religion and society ; and the two 
elements which find their mutual strength 



42 The Church in Modern Society. 

in union were hopelessly sundered and 
have ever since been kept apart in our re- 
ligious development. It was the Puritan 
who drew this vicious line between the 
church and the world, and alienated the 
social from the religious life. In Eng- 
land and France the national church has 
done much to transmit the social integra- 
tion of religion with life, so that the separa- 
tion has not been so marked as it is in a 
country where national religious institu- 
tions do not exist. It is not to be denied 
that the Christianity of this country is an 
immense power ; it is here simply pointed 
out that from the beginning it has 
missed one of the prime elements of influ- 
ence in the social world. It has not been 
homogeneous with our political or social 
life. It has been a continual contest be- 
tween two separate views of Christianity — 
the institutional presentation of truth and 
the regeneration of the individual ; and this 
contest is to-day, what it was one or two 
hundred years ago, the dividing line in all 



The Church in Disintegration. 43 

our efforts to bring the Christian Church 
into the central position where it can do 
for modern society what it did for the 
average man and woman of the Middle 
Ages, when monastic and other Christian 
institutions were scattered all over Eng- 
land and Western Europe. 

The collective church is separated to-day, 
as it has been since the Standing Order 
was overthrown in New England, from the 
secular interests of life. This separation 
is one of our national traditions. It is not 
only separation, but division. The differ- 
ent denominations compel the maintenance 
of different organizations. This develops 
the separatist principle with reference to 
one another. The support of these estab- 
lishments draws the Christian members 
away from the central interests of society 
and commits them to the support of eccle- 
siasticism. This naturally intensifies the 
national religious weakness of separating 
things sacred from things secular, so that 
there is little direct help to be derived 



44 The Church in Modern Society. 

from the Christian societies toward im- 
proving the moral life of the people. In 
many things our present ecclesiasticism 
works directly against the interests which 
Christian persons should be anxious to 
promote. Both in our towns and in our 
villages the maintenance of rival parochial 
organizations withdraws from the commu- 
nity much of the influence of the most 
worthy people, who feel obliged to work 
for their parishes instead of looking after 
the real prosperity of the whole family of 
God in the community. 

The practical operation of Christianity 
in this form is to separate into cliques per- 
sons who ought to be in earnest coopera- 
tion with each other. They cannot have 
as their first aim the good of the whole. 
Their very attitude toward the community 
is wrong ; they are not free to do what the 
large heart prompts them to undertake. 
The conception of the Christian religion 
that is in practical operation is a contra- 
diction of the state of things which Chris- 



The Church in Disintegration. 45 

tianity is intended to produce. The people 
are divided into cliques who do separate- 
ly what should be done by the collective 
church in the community with the spirit 
of one man. Different religionists define 
their positions with reference to one an- 
other and exalt dogma above the interests 
of the whole population. The tendency 
is to narrow their views, to contract their 
range of thought, to prevent the church as 
an institution from being identified with 
the secular welfare of the people ; and this 
is where the Christian life of the country 
is most seriously checked at the present 
time. It is the welfare of the denomina- 
tion, not the welfare of the entire Church 
of God, which receives attention, and so 
far as this spirit prevails, it is partially an- 
tagonistic to the influence which Christian- 
ity ought to have upon towns, villages, and 
neighborhoods. It is impossible for the 
pastor of a congregation in a town or vil- 
lage to do for the citizens what he might 
do if the people were entirely under his 



46 The Church in Modern Society. 

parochial charge. Hostility or at least 
rivalry exists between two or more sepa- 
rate organizations, and things are not seen 
from the central point of unity. The Chris- 
tian Church has come to represent a cer- 
tain religious order rather than an inspir- 
ing principle. 

Where there is no national church, it is 
not easy to supply its place. Where the 
church is not central in society, it is not 
at the point where it can do the most for 
the social and personal amelioration of the 
people. The difficulty with our organiza- 
tion of religion is that it does too little for 
social interests. It aims to do more for a 
man in the next life than it helps him to 
perform in the life that now is. The need 
of the working church is greater than men 
recognize, and this cannot be at its best 
where those who meet together are not 
agreed, and willing to cooperate in essen- 
tial things. The narrowness of the differ- 
ent bodies which constitute the Church of 
Christ in the United States is a great 



The Church in Disintegration. 47 

drawback to their usefulness. Their work- 
ing principle is opposed to comprehension. 
They have a creed which is narrower and 
more definite within certain limits than 
the complete statement of the facts of 
Christianity, and this acts as a limit to the 
work which they aim to do. Each sepa- 
rate organization has something less than 
the force and strength of the whole Church 
of Christ. This is acknowledged in its 
very name, as well as in the details or omis- 
sions of its creed. It often represents an 
opinion about the Christian religion rather 
than the full substance of that religion. 
This is inevitable from the very condition of 
things, and the deficiency in the creed is 
responsible for the lack of comprehension 
which still further alienates the church 
from the social activities of the people. 
This is deeply felt as a serious deficiency 
in the Christian forces of England by men 
like Dr. James Martineau, who sees in the 
exclusiveness of its range of action the 
failure of the existing church in Great 



48 The Church in Modern Society. 

Britain to meet the demands of the reli- 
gious life of the nation. He would secure 
such a federation of the present religious 
forces that the conception of the working 
church should be coextensive with the 
thought and spirit and activity of the en- 
tire people. This would go far to restore 
Christianity to the place which it held in 
the earlier ages, when it was the religion of 
the entire nation, not of cliques, some of 
which hold to one part of the faith and 
some to another. 

The combination of our American Chris- 
tian organizations in such a way that the 
strength of each shall be felt in the in- 
creasing comprehensiveness of all is the 
method of escape from the serious limita- 
tions which now stand in the way of their 
usefulness. The national mark of our re- 
ligion is that it does not control society. 
The religious element is absent from the 
common life of the people. What social 
and common life most need is a larger 
recognition of spiritual purpose. The 



The Church in Disintegration. 49 

nation has not yet recovered from the 
dividing line, introduced by the Puritans, 
which separates practical Christianity from 
the broader activities in which every citi- 
zen is expected to find his sphere of work. 
The general conception of the Christian 
Church is based upon this line of distinc- 
tion and manifests itself in a thousand 
modifications of current thought and life. 
Nothing like the English method of opera- 
tion is possible here, because in this coun- 
try all religious societies are equal in 
power and opportunity ; but the gradual 
change of view in looking at the situation, 
so that the things held in common shall 
become more prominent, and the points of 
divergence shall recede into their proper 
insignificance, seems to be leading to that 
larger purpose and experience through 
which all these bodies are to be delivered 
from the limitations of their creeds and 
their methods. 



CHAPTER V. 

The Church in the World. 

r I "'HE difference between the church 
•*- and the state in modern society is 
that the state still deals with humanity as 
a whole, while the church has no juris- 
diction over a large portion of the people. 
The church is an organization within the 
state, not coextensive with it. And yet 
the influence which the church has always 
had in controlling the moral and spiritual 
interests of society is more needed now 
than it was when institutions were all-pre- 
vailing and the freedom of the individual 
had not been secured. When the family 
life is not protected, it is difficult to se- 
cure the education necessary to make the 
good citizen ; when the state fails to edu- 
cate its members in the duties of citizen- 



The Church in the World. 5/ 

ship, the nation is unable to protect its 
interests ; and when the church has no 
influence over a large portioh of the 
people, it is difficult to maintain the con- 
stant appeal to the conscience of men 
which secures the supremacy of moral 
rights and keeps fresh their sense of duty 
to one another. The state simply regu- 
lates existing conditions; it does not in- 
troduce a new view of present life. The 
church, on the other hand, represents the 
ethical and spiritual motives which give 
moral power to the state and impart moral 
and spiritual tone to society. It bases 
its authority not on what the individual 
is compelled to concede to others for the 
sake of the common weal, but on the 
brotherhood of men and their mutual de- 
pendence on one another. It represents 
the moral ideal of human society, and its 
aim and purpose is to introduce that ideal 
into the world-order. Though its aim is 
moral, where that of the state is political 
and economic, it derives its authority not 



52 The Church in Modern Society. 

only from the consent of the governed, 
but from the Divine Person whom it rep- 
resents ; it is influential only so far as its 
teachings and principles are accepted by 
individuals or by the community. And 
yet without this insistence on moral and 
spiritual sanctions, the state feels the 
absence of that authority, coordinate with 
itself yet distinctly spiritual, which relates 
the unseen God to the social world in 
which his purposes are recorded in the 
processes of history. 

In our own time the state has " slowly 
broadened down from precedent to pre- 
cedent/' until it is a government "of the 
people, by the people, and for the people." 
The church has not followed to the same 
degree the tendency to spiritual democracy, 
though it must always find its sphere 
through the agency of the people in order 
to fulfill its mission among men. The 
problem before the Christian Church to- 
day is whether it can maintain its spiritual 
prerogative and be as truly the ministrant 



The Church in the World. 53 

to the unguided multitudes of our day as 
it was the guide and inspiration of the 
thousands who first believed in Christi- 
anity and felt the inspiration of the new 
convictions of life and duty which it gave 
to them. This problem presses hard upon 
those who are seeking the solution of 
our industrial and social difficulties. The 
breaking aw T ay of the individual from the 
institutional restraints of another age has 
resulted in placing people, in a religious 
point of view, outside of the general cov- 
enant relation with the church by baptism, 
which, if it did not impart to them per- 
sonal righteousness, at least maintained 
the feeling of relationship to a great re- 
ligious order, which was not without some 
general influence upon their lives. They 
now simply stand up in the social ranks, 
entirely ignoring the work of an institution 
which, regarded even in a worldly point of 
view, is the complement of the state in 
regulating the life of society. Speaking 
generally, the church to-day is an insti- 



54 The Church in Modern Society. 

tution maintained by those who are able 
to support it. In democratic society it 
derives no advantage from the state and 
asks no favors, but stands aside from 
the rush of political and industrial inter- 
ests and deals by consent with the un- 
worldly element in life. The day has for- 
ever passed when the threats of excom- 
munication can make men tremble. The 
power of the church as a spiritual cor- 
poration armed with extreme penalties 
has been lost and is not to return. Its 
strength is no longer in its penalties, 
but in its relations of service to the uni- 
versal brotherhood of men. It is the 
collective church which is here spoken 
of, not this or that section of it ; and this 
collective church stands in a peculiarly 
transitional relation to modern society. 
In our free and individual life, it is 
impossible to maintain its supremacy 
along the old lines of procedure, and 
there is a general halt to see what it is 
best to do. Different families of Chris- 



The Church in the World. 55 

tians have worked out different results ; 
some have verged to the extreme of de- 
mocracy in their methods, and others still 
cling with great tenacity to a style of 
thought and methods of work which re- 
strict their influence chiefly to special 
classes of people. Amid these divisions, 
the narrowness of the sect has the power 
to restrict the range of thought and keep 
our different organizations of Christianity 
from seeing the situation in the large. 
It has been remarked that American re- 
ligious bodies have shown less power to 
adapt themselves to the changed con- 
ditions of modern society than the mother 
churches in Europe from which they 
sprang. This is undoubtedly true, and 
the greatest weakness of our collective 
Christianity to-day is that the leaders of 
its different sections have too little ca- 
pacity to rise to a clear view of the po- 
sition in which Christianity stands to the 
whole American people. There is no 
national religion corresponding, in breadth 



56 The Church in Modern Society. 

of view and in elasticity of methods, to our 
national government, and men see, for the 
most part, only so far as the limits of 
the sect with which they are connected. 
This prevents the adaptation of our re- 
ligious methods to the needs of the people 
as a whole, as an integral portion of man- 
kind. The organization of our religious 
life is too narrow for its proper expansion. 
It is found that our government, though 
not changed in its fundamental principles, 
is constantly changing in the stress brought 
to bear upon this or that part of our gen- 
eral system, and the same process is going 
on irresistibly in the ecclesiastical life of 
the people. There is an appeal to a con- 
stantly growing conception of life. It is 
the free expansion of this life which the 
churches, wedded to methods of work 
or conceptions of doctrine which have 
served their purpose, are too slow to 
appreciate ; and it is here that the great 
gap is found to-day between the Ameri- 
can church and American life. Until 



The Church in the World. $j 

the church in the person of its leaders 
rises to the conception of its duty to give 
a fresh social conception to Christianity, 
a conception which manifests insight into 
the present ordering of life and displays 
the mastery of its conditions, the masses 
of the people must continue to feel that 
for all their higher interests the different 
religious societies can do them little good. 
When the whole world is entering upon 
a new development of industrial and com- 
mercial possibilities, it stands to reason 
that neither the church nor the state can 
occupy the same position that they held 
a century ago. The state has changed ; 
it responds with alacrity to the convictions 
of the people ; but the church, because it 
deals, not with the temporalities of the 
people, but with their spiritual condition, 
has made the mistake of separating in its 
thought and management the industrial 
and social from the moral and spiritual 
life. The line of separation may be im- 
aginary, but it exists in the class or club 



5§ The Church in Modern Society. 

idea as the basis of church action, and 
in prejudices to this end which are not 
easily eradicated from the minds of those 
who have nothing to gain in a worldly- 
sense from ecclesiastical connections. The 
church is in the world, if it fulfills its 
mission, not to help those who have most 
present advantages, but to leaven society 
not less than the lives of individual men 
and women with the mind and the spirit 
which were in Jesus Christ. It is this 
large and free and modern conception of 
the Church of Christ which is yet to be 
fully realized among us. It is here that 
the broader Kingdom of God is to be 
begun. 

The Church of Christ is to-day all that 
it ever was in its essence, in its spiritual 
functions, in its possession of the spirit 
of the living God. The individual, in 
the growth of his sense of personality, 
in the possibilities of his greater personal 
development, in his mastery of the world 
beyond himself, is more than he ever was. 



The Church in the World. 59 

This individual is the representative of 
the forces in the world which are yet to be 
controlled and elevated by spiritual means, 
and the Church of Christ is still the chief 
instrument by which the moral regenera- 
tion of society is to be effected. How shall 
the church be reinforced to meet the just 
expectations of those who believe in its 
instrumental power ? How shall it re- 
ceive back into its fold the children of 
those who have broken away from its 
sanctions and discipline ? How shall the 
conscience that anticipates and maintains 
justice be restored to the social and in- 
dustrial life of the community ? How 
shall the toiling millions be made to feel 
that there is anything in life but a toil- 
some journey from the cradle to the grave ? 
Is the Christian Church to command the 
situation, or are the people connected with 
religious societies to be one company, 
and the persons who have lost all hope 
of any betterment of life through the 
church to form another ? These questions 



60 The Church in Modern Society. 

are asked, not by the careless and unthink- 
ing, but by those who survey the religious 
interests of the people in their national 
significance. It is one thing to reckon 
the host of Israel and count numbers as 
prosperity ; it is quite another to bring 
the Ark of God into the centre of the 
host where its presence shall reanimate 
all men with the convictions for which it 
stands. 

What does society most need to-day ? 
The industrial revolution is scarcely more 
marked than the political revolution. 
There is an unmistakable unwillingness 
to go to the past for antecedents or for 
authority. The thought of every man is 
occupied with the work of reconstruction, 
and there is no sphere of life or thought 
which escapes this ordeal. The religious 
interests of the community are under the 
same movement, and what is called the 
" new theology " is nothing more than the 
adaptation of abiding truths to the changed 
conditions of thought. The church moves 



The Church in the World. 61 

last because it is naturally even more in- 
stitutional in its character than the state, 
slower to receive new ideas, and more 
powerful to hold society steadfast to what 
is of permanent obligation. All the ele- 
ments of society are in motion to-day, but 
the political and industrial attract most at- 
tention because they are most immediate 
and affect the greatest number of people. 
The first need of such a time as our own 
is that moral principles shall have unim- 
paired influence. This is a simple point to 
make, but whoever has watched the devel- 
opment of the industrial issues between 
the capitalists and the workmen whom they 
employ will have noted that every question 
between them involves a moral principle. 
The one party is attempting to take ad- 
vantage of the other. The state may in- 
terpose as arbitrator, but though in its 
evolution it is as a whole a moral agent 
and is endowed with moral personality, it 
is only commissioned to act under the 
forms of law, and these forms are the only 



62 The Church in Modern Society. 

expression of moral purpose with which 
the state is directly concerned. The gov- 
ernment is an arrangement for the regula- 
tion of liberty. The inspiration and up- 
lifting of society comes from another quar- 
ter. The moral purpose comes from in- 
dividuals ; but its solidarity is not secured 
through single individuals, no matter how 
valuable their moral qualities may be, but 
through the aggregate or corporate pres- 
entation of their influence in the forms of 
institutional life. To illustrate : the re- 
ligious society in a particular village may 
contain perhaps half-a-dozen individuals 
who have great personal influence; but 
their weight as individuals is one thing, 
and the influence of the Christian organ- 
ization which absorbs their moral weight 
and converts it into institutional power for 
righteousness in the community is im- 
mensely greater and more powerful. This 
is the difference between personality and 
institutional power. This is the vantage 
ground of the Christian Church as an 



The Church in the World. 6) 

influence in the present changes of society. 
If the permanently valuable elements of 
our social order are retained, it will be 
because the direct and indirect forces of 
righteousness which go forth from the 
aggregated Christian organizations of the 
land have acquired the institutional power 
to prevail over the looseness and weakness 
of individual life. 

There is more than the need of moral 
principles. There is the need of a larger 
estimate of the value and meaning of life, 
which comes not from the sense of justice, 
though it has this sense behind it, but 
from a recognition of each man's right to 
live and enjoy a fair share of the rights 
and privileges that are the common inher- 
itance of all. The relations between man 
and man are not elevated enough to secure 
this result; you are not sure of it; the 
state, though divine as an institution, does 
not emphasize the divine sanctions of so- 
cial action. But when the Christian motive 
of kindliness is introduced and Christian 



64 The Church in Modern Society. 

brotherhood is felt to be the model of so- 
cial order as God would have it, life takes 
on a new character and the world is a good 
place to live in. It is Christianity felt in 
the community as a permanent institution 
of society which adds this grace to life. 
The moral atmosphere of a town or city is 
the impression which is produced by the 
general influence of the church among the 
people. The closer the church is connected 
with the interests of the community the 
stronger is the impression it makes ; and it 
is this influence, the action of the church 
upon the family and upon public opinion, 
and their combined action upon the in- 
dividual, which is chiefly to impart cheer 
to the great company of bread-winners in 
the slow evolution of new relations be- 
tween capital and labor. The state admin- 
isters justice as between man and man. 
The church appeals to the conscience and 
kindles the sense of right and wrong ; 
it stands between both parties, as often 
allied with the one as with the other, but 



The Church in the World. 65 

never the antagonist of either ; it has the 
difficult task of obtaining recognition for 
an authority which is the highest influence 
in life, and yet has no power to compel 
direct assent or obedience to its injunc- 
tions ; it deals with immaterial forces, and 
its influence is often strongest when its 
direct authority is least. The touch that 
is to renew the hopes of men and again 
make life delightful is the touch of the 
Church of Christ, the touch of a helping 
hand among the poor, the touch of kindli- 
ness of heart in dealing with one another, 
the touch of a keener sense of what can be 
done for humanity at large, the touch of a 
relation in which the forces of a divine 
love are felt in the ordinary circumstances 
of life. 

To sum it all up in a sentence, it is the 
ethical relation of the church to the com- 
munity which is most powerful to-day ; it 
is the influence which changes society 
while it changes the individual. And this 
result is not reached by the usual instru- 



66 The Church in Modern Society. 

mentalities, because they are not ethically 
adequate for the work expected of them. 
The church is apt to be formalized, and its 
methods are too much the methods of a 
past generation. The successful method 
is that which deals with the present con- 
victions of men and women as to the social 
pressure in daily life, and is able to carry 
their hopes and thoughts to a higher level. 
Wherever this method — which is not a 
stereotyped method but depends upon the 
kind of sympathy that different neighbor- 
hoods need — has been employed, the re- 
sponse has been immediate and gratifying. 
There is no time like one of profound social 
and industrial agitation in which to put 
truth before men with the hope that it 
may take root in their hearts and bring 
forth fruit in their lives. The formal 
things of the church, however important in 
themselves as the conservators of spiritual 
order, are not like the ethical power of the 
spirit of life. The work of the church is 
to change and renew lives, and this is to 



The Church in the World. 67 

be accomplished through its general rela- 
tion to society and through its special re- 
lation to individuals. But its work is not 
confined to its own members. It has the 
world as its field, and its formative work 
in the entire round of human effort is the 
sphere in which the call is now most 
urgent. It is for this reason that the 
chronic disturbances in industry have the 
deepest ethical interest. They are the re- 
sult of slow changes in the general struc- 
ture of society; they are the evolution of a 
new industrial order ; they are the result 
of economic forces which are as yet im- 
perfectly estimated. What they imply 
may be an advance for the race, but the 
advance like all progress will be by spiral 
lines, not rapid, not always assuring, not 
equal to human wishes, but waiting on the 
command of the Divine Ruler of men. 
The advance, the enlightenment, will be 
the gradual perception, amid great and con- 
tinuous disorder, of the essential and true 
brotherhood of men under a common 



68 The Church in Modern Society. 

Father. It is the church as the guide and 
inspiration of humanity which is most 
needed to-day, and it is this character of 
the church which is now brought forward 
where its work is most successful. The 
demand is that the ordinary life of men 
shall be improved, and it is felt that in 
some vague way, though the world is full 
of the manifestations of human kindliness, 
the church is able to secure this improve- 
ment and renewal. The church has long 
been the pet of the higher classes and the 
luxury of the few ; it is felt alike within 
and without its confines that the time has 
come for its broader identification with 
all the interests of life. The ethical work 
of the future will be this identification. 



CHAPTER VI. 



The Inclusive Church. 



PHE realization of the presence of God 
-*- in the forces of the world is one of 
the difficulties which human experience 
has done little to remove. It seems often 
easier to see God in nature than in the 
processes of life. The evidence of a per- 
sonal Deity is demonstrated in nature by 
the witness of mind directing what men 
call law ; but in the sphere of the moral 
and social world, where the will of man 
has to do with the ordering of life, where 
the complexity of existence hides the sim- 
plicity of action, it seems as if God were 
out of sight, and the convictions of society 
go far to conceal his presence. In the 
sphere of secondary causes it requires 
some effort to go behind their action and 
realize the direction of God in the world ; 



jo The Church in Modern Society. 

and yet the higher life of every man is 
based upon the immanence of God in our 
daily life. Human actions are right or 
wrong as they are in harmony with or con- 
tradict the ultimate standard which in the 
last analysis is believed to be the will of 
God. Human events seem for a genera- 
tion to be in the hands of human leaders, 
and we see the marks of their grasp of 
things; but in the space of two or three 
generations the order of events and the 
action of ideas upon the social life are 
seen to be under the control of a higher 
law of continuity than that of human de- 
sign. Men lose their hold of affairs, but 
God never relaxes his grasp ; and in the 
long avenues of history men note that 
One who is unseen has builded better than 
they knew. Human consciousness is the 
great centre of appeal for the unity of im- 
pressions, stronger or weaker in different 
persons, which recognize the presence of 
God in the life of men. There are few 
well-developed minds that do not in some 



The Inclusive Church. 7/ 

way acknowledge this presence and wait 
upon its manifestations. Much as the 
world is run by the power of will and by 
material forces that are under the control 
of will, there is a consciousness, not born 
of superstition, which recognizes the divine 
movement in human society. It is not ob- 
trusive, but like the music of the spheres 
it is heard and felt when it is listened for 
and noted. Elijah heard the still small 
voice when he found that there was noth- 
ing in the raging of the elements that had 
preceded it ; and he heard it partly be- 
cause his mind and heart were prepared 
to listen for it. 

The practical inference from this large 
consciousness that God is ordering human 
society after a plan not fully disclosed to 
mankind, is that his presence is specially 
revealed in the moral and spiritual agencies 
which control the direction of life. God 
is revealed in the family as the agency 
not only for the propagation of life but 
for the training of life according to the 



J2 The Church in Modern Society. 

best light that our experience affords. 
The household in which we spend our 
earliest years is the training school in 
which our first impressions are fixed, and 
in which they are most firmly rooted. 
This is a natural school ; it is a part of 
one's birthright. But it is only one of the 
agencies by which the life of the individual 
is controlled. The civil and industrial 
and political sphere, which is considered 
as the totality of the state in its relation 
to personal life, is the complement of the 
family training and constitutes the field 
in which one finds his place and useful- 
ness. This has its material side, as also 
has the family ; but in its higher character 
the state is a moral and even a spiritual 
organism, through which God acts upon 
civil society and educates mankind for 
their several duties. The church, as dis- 
tinguished from the family and the state, 
is exclusively a moral and spiritual agency. 
It is concerned with the moral and spirit- 
ual direction and education of mankind. 



The Inclusive Church. 73 

Whether you take close or large ideas 
of its functions in human society, it is 
nothing less than an agency, like the state 
and the family, which is universal in its 
oversight of life and in its spiritual pur- 
pose toward mankind. While God is 
everywhere and no one escapes his ob- 
servation, there is a closer sense in which 
God is in his church and has committed 
to it certain large interests pertaining 
to the welfare of mankind. Take the 
Church of the Jews for an illustration. 
This was a church coextensive with the 
nation, protecting its moral and spiritual 
interests, and constantly dealing with the 
people as a race under covenant relations. 
There is a largeness about the Church of 
the Jews which aptly shows how the in- 
stitutional life of the people was repre- 
sented by it. It is always the national 
body. It cares for the interests of the 
people as a race. It furnishes our best 
example in history of the way in which 
the race-consciousness of a remarkably 



j 4 The Church in Modern Society. 

spiritual people was controlled by religious 
instrumentalities. Ewald has brought out 
this feature of the theocracy strongly in 
his " History of Israel/' and whoever 
studies the Old Testament with ordinary 
attention will realize it for himself. The 
church and the state were almost identical 
in the Jewish theocracy, but the illus- 
tration shows in what sense the Christian 
Church becomes a living force even in 
a modern community when it acts upon 
society as a corporate whole. In Chris- 
tian history there are many instances in 
which the church has had a controlling 
power over great peoples and given them 
a unity in their development under the 
forms of civil society which they could 
not otherwise have reached. Where a 
race or a nation has come under the lead 
of a comprehensive spiritual organization, 
there has been a corresponding largeness 
of purpose or design ; and in a formal way 
God is said to dwell with these people 
through his church as well as in their in- 



The Inclusive Church. 75 

dividual hearts. There is something im- 
plied in the formal church which is less 
implicitly expressed in the world outside. 
The church is the sphere of man's spirit- 
ual education. It is represented by hun- 
dreds of parishes, reaching to every col- 
lection of individuals throughout the land, 
coming down through the methods of 
doing spiritual work in these parishes to 
the individual mind and conscience, and 
working the personal regeneration of man- 
kind. It is a great organization of in- 
strumentalities, which not only affects 
society in the large, but penetrates like 
the sunlight into the darkest recesses of 
humanity. It is not discharging its func- 
tions successfully when it is simply an 
ecclesiastical organization which covers a 
certain territory, or when it exerts its 
power in a formal way in upholding moral 
and spiritual agencies in the country ; it 
needs the complement of personal expe- 
rience of the message of God through 
Christ to the individual soul before it can 



j6 The Church in Modern Socfety. 

< 

be said that the church has njeasured the 
true reason of its power. All compre- 
hensive ideas of Christianity need to be 
supplemented by the personal relation in 
which the soul stands to God before they 
can operate with the warmth and strength 
that belong to them. The comprehensive 
church is nothing more than the Chris- 
tianity which is before the country in the 
aggregate, but when considered in its com- 
prehensive form or in the totality of its in- 
fluence it stands out quite differently from 
what it seems in the light of its divisions. 
The one thing that has been missed in 
our own country has been this compre- 
hensive form of Christianity. There has 
been not only no national organization 
of religion, but most Christians have never 
thought or worked outside of the religious 
cliques in which they were brought up or 
in which they have found themselves. 
The church has not been thought of as 
an institution as grand, as comprehensive, 
as universal, as all-embracing as our na- 



The Inclusive Church. 7 J 

tional consciousness. It has not been 
regarded as coextensive with the nation 
and the family among the institutions by 
which God permits men to govern the 
world. It has not lifted its voice in na- 
tional affairs as the Hebrew prophets lifted 
up their voices at critical periods in the 
history of Israel. It has not made itself 
felt as a unit in dictating the national 
policy on questions in which ethics enter 
as a national factor. It has not controlled 
and guided our civilization so as to give 
a Christian character to the national con- 
sciousness. It has not carried into the 
world's life the emphatic convictions of 
a Christian people. American Christianity 
is weak to-day because it has no recog- 
nized voice. There is no national note 
about it. Whether Protestant or Catholic, 
it is the religion of specialists, and has no 
national or race significance. In a certain 
sense, it fails to carry the weight of God 
behind it. It speaks for something less 
than this, when the full weight of God's 



j8 The Church in Modern Society. 

commission to an authorized church, which 
is also the church of the people of the 
nation, is not its charter and its present 
consciousness. The restoration of this 
consciousness ; the reaching out to national 
conceptions of Christianity; the making 
of the religion of the people as significant 
as their politics ; the placing of the em- 
phasis upon great and central ideas of 
national morality, of national education, 
of the national bearing of industrial, eco- 
nomic, and social questions ; the reaching 
of something like unity in the general 
spiritual consciousness of the people, — is 
the direction in which the immanence of 
God in human society, and especially in 
the moral and spiritual agencies through 
which society expresses itself, takes on 
the character of nationality. The Church 
of Christ is but a poor makeshift so long 
as it comes short in modern society of 
the greatness and the majesty of the 
Jewish Church when that organization 
controlled Hebrew existence. So long 



The Inclusive Church. yg 

as it depends upon this or that sectarian 
and partial exhibition of its capabilities 
in dealing with the questions which con- 
cern humanity, so long as it stops short 
of realizing its progressive power through 
the devising of liberal things, so long as 
it fails to hold before the community the 
greatness and the grandeur of Christian 
institutions, it will fail to fulfill its divine 
mission in society. The church to-day 
in America no longer satisfies anybody 
who considers its possibilities and com- 
pares them with its performance. And 
this dissatisfaction is largely due to the 
smallness of the conception of what Chris- 
tianity is ; to the consideration of its de- 
velopment as a sectarian institution, set 
to the propagation of certain ideas and 
not careful to see whether they are in 
accord with the large conception of Chris- 
tianity which includes the whole of a 
nation's existence and interests ; and to 
the contentment of people with the im- 
perfect working out of the ideas of social 



80 The Church in Modern Society. 

and spiritual uplifting which constitute 
the concrete power of Christianity in the 
community. 

The Church of Christ, operative in the 
affairs of men as the chief agency for 
righteousness in the world, should express 
the largest conception of the higher life 
which it is possible to entertain. In 
Plato's Republic the ideal state passes in 
its beautiful form before the eye, and its 
functions correspond to the perfect life. 
Likewise in the Christian Church the ideal 
of what the church in its collective form 
ought to be passes in view before the 
mind's eye, and its possibilities of service 
to modern society are more delightful 
when traced with the imagination than 
when they are made to tally with actual 
fact. The church of to-day has to recover 
what it has lost since the end of the Mid- 
dle Ages and the rise of civil society. 
Then it controlled education, social insti- 
tutions, the great guilds, the family life, the 
entire outward existence of men. It had 



The Inclusive Church. 81 

the word of command over social life. 
Afterwards, the individual man, the repre- 
sentative of personal Hberty, appeared and 
broke the spell of this charmed existence. 
It was then said that the church existed 
to save the individual soul ; and when the 
Reformation came, it was the individual 
soul that men thought of, not the saving 
of society. The one ought never to have 
been separated from the other. In the 
Roman and in the Anglican Churches the 
one has always been considered as impor- 
tant as the other ; but wherever pure Pro- 
testantism has prevailed, the social side 
of Christianity has been lost to a great 
extent, because the stress has been laid too 
exclusively upon the renewal of the indi- 
vidual soul. The institutional conception 
of Christian society has been overlooked. 
Accordingly, Christianity is what you see 
it almost everywhere in America, a move- 
ment bearing the character of a spent or a 
misapplied or an unwisely directed force. 
This religious body believes in the univer- 



82 The Church in Modern Society. 

sality of the atonement ; that organization 
holds to the speedy second coming of our 
Lord ; one would put the stress of the true 
church on a mode of baptism ; -another 
would find the centre of interest in an 
emotional experience called conversion ; 
another would rest the salvation of men 
upon the acceptance of the perfect man- 
hood of the historical Christ ; another 
would exalt Luther's dogma of justification 
by faith to the central place in the Chris- 
tian system ; still another would throw 
away the entire Christian Church and begin 
anew with the teachings of Swedenborg. 
There is no unity in the conception of the 
Christian religion in these discordant sys- 
tems, nothing which raises the enthusiasm 
of humanity, nothing which heartens one 
to believe in Christianity itself ; it is an 
opinion about the Christian religion with 
an argumentative support derived from 
the Bible, but there is no power in it 
to grasp vigorously the issues of life in 
the community and lead them in large 



The Inclusive Church. 83 

directions. People become religious, but 
their convictions are not compacted into 
regenerative motive power. Religious in- 
fluence becomes conservative and conven- 
tional, and the spiritual thought moves in 
hard and well-worn ruts. There is not 
enough strength in this conventional 
Christianity to save it from dying. Par- 
ishes and ministers go their feeble rounds 
of routine service, but there is no enthu- 
siasm in the work, and everything dies 
like vegetation in a time of drought be- 
cause there is a lack of vitality in the 
earth and the air. This condition of af- 
fairs is familiar to all who have any expe- 
rience with the different forms in which 
American Christianity has expressed itself. 
It is felt that the Christian religion is 
immensely larger than the common moulds 
in which it has been shaped and presented 
to men. 

The condition of things in our own coun- 
try turns one back to first principles. The 
Church of Christ needs to be idealized. It 



84 The Church in Modern Society. 

is more inclusive, more controlling, more 
comprehensive, more helpful, more educa- 
ting, more inspiring, more soul-strengthen- 
ing, than it seems when it is seen in the 
hard realism of its actual limitations and 
conditions. It is well to keep the ideal 
before men in order that they may rise to 
the conception of ideal manhood, and the 
same is true of an institution which stands 
out in human society as the incarnation of 
the Divine Life. The church is the bride 
of Christ. It is the pillar and the ground 
of truth. It is the conservator of the 
divine movement in the world as it was 
once expressed in the Hebrew history and 
as it has been manifested in the historical 
facts concerning Jesus Christ. It is the 
institution which first among the Hebrews, 
and since the nativity of Jesus Christ 
among the Gentiles, has been the " light 
of the world." It is the continuous testi- 
mony to a power that acts upon the souls 
of men as the family acts upon their child- 
hood, and as the state acts upon their 



The Inclusive Church. 85 

mature life. But in the family and in the 
state the testimony of the divine life is 
seen in the course of ordinary nature ; it 
is the continuous control of life for be- 
neficent ends. The church undertakes to 
deal, not only with the social sphere in 
which men find their field of practical use- 
fulness, but with the higher life, the rela- 
tion of the soul to God, the union of man 
with God, the development of the control 
of all human life by the recognition of its 
central source in God, the power breathed 
into men of being united by spiritual ties 
with the Christ, so that in reaching his 
perfect manhood they may reach the iden- 
tification of the human will with the divine 
will, which is the source of the perfectness 
of his own life. Everything in the aim 
and purpose of the church as the repre- 
sentative of Christ on earth is to lift hu- 
manity into some faint human realization 
of what finds its ideal expression in the 
life and work of Christ as the Son of Man 
and also the Son of God. 



86 The Church in Modern Society. 

We go to Christ, and to what the apos- 
tles have told us of his plans, for the work- 
ing ideas of the Christian Church at any age 
of the world. And as often as reformers, 
who did not aim at the inauguration of a 
new dispensation, but only at the restora- 
tion of what they thought the church had 
lost in its contact with the state and the 
family, have returned to the simplicity of 
Christ's plans for the regeneration of the 
individual or of society, the blessing of 
God has attended their efforts. The re- 
sult has proved the inspiration that exists 
in the collective church and in its power 
as the representative of Christ to regen- 
erate the world. It is this Church, of 
which the existing divisions of the Chris- 
tian family are the aggregate whole, which 
in any nation is the instrumentality for 
treating men as the children of God and 
teaching them their relations and duties 
to him. The church embraces every in- 
terest which pertains to the individual or 
social life in the community. It is first 



The Inclusive Church. 87 

of all an instrumentality for bringing the 
individual into closer relations with God 
through the remission of sin and the in- 
spiration of help for a better living. Chris- 
tianity gave men at the beginning the 
conception of the duties and the respon- 
sibilities of the individual. It dealt with 
man not as a member of the common- 
wealth, like that of the Jews, but as a re- 
sponsible being who had his duties to God, 
as the Father Almighty, after the simili- 
tude of his duties to an earthly parent. It 
magnified the personal element in the in- 
dividual till it reached the size of the world. 
It was to make the individual soul what 
God created it capable of being that Christ 
became incarnate, and took the lead in 
human redemption, and triumphed as the 
Son of God in the resurrection. But this 
was only the beginning of Christ's work 
for humanity. What Christ had done for 
the individual man he was to do for his 
fellow. Christianity from the start incul- 
cated the brotherhood of mankind, and be- 



88 The Church in Modern Society. 

came as broad as human society. It not 
only purposed to regenerate the individual, 
but to change the conditions of life which 
surrounded him. It has reached out to the 
state on the one hand and to the family on 
the other, and has allied itself with all 
kinds of natural goodness, until it has in- 
fused its spirit into every form of human 
society. This has been its twofold mission 
in the world. 

It is from this point of view that its true 
position in modern life is to be considered. 
It is coextensive with the whole of the 
interests of mankind ; and nothing better 
shows this than the discovery, in our socio- 
logical and economic studies of the present 
day, that all these lower questions find 
their solution in an ethical principle. 
Nothing pertaining to the welfare of man 
can be attentively considered which does 
not lead up to the Church of Christ as an 
important factor in the solution of the 
problem. Our present methods of realiz- 
ing the power of the church in the world 



The Inclusive Church. 8g 

represent certain definite ideas, but the 
progress of the individual in modern life 
and the increased complexity of society 
have brought the Christian Church face to 
face with the gravest matters which con- 
front mankind, and they demand from its 
leaders, if the church be indeed what they 
claim for it, that higher direction which it 
should have as the keeper of the oracles of 
God. The whole breadth of modern life is 
the field in which the modern church is 
asked to expend its energies. It can never 
again go back to the simplicity of the first 
Christian centuries, nor to the small ideas 
of God's ordering of the world which used 
to pass for an adequate description of the 
functions of the church in society. It 
must either advance into the glorious ser- 
vice and destiny which open out to it in 
the larger life of men, or recede to an 
insignificant position among the forces 
which govern the world. There is an 
earnest questioning of the powers that be 
to-day in order to find out what they are 



go The Church in Modem Society. 

good for. Nothing is taken for granted, 
and the combination of the historical with 
the scientific method is felt in the realm of 
theology not less than in the study of the 
processes of history. The question which 
arises at every turn in our studies of act- 
ual life is, What shall be done to invest 
human activity with moral power and pur- 
pose ? If the Christian Church is what we 
have been taught to believe it to be, what 
part shall it have in the new civilization ? 




CHAPTER VII. 



The Spiritual Method of the Church. 

\\ 7HILE the church is an important 
* factor in civil society, it has a prin- 
ciple and method which are entirely peculiar 
to itself. Its aim is to take the individual 
man at his birth, or at a later period, and 
make him something which by nature he 
is not. It exists for the renewal of man in 
his spiritual functions, for the removal of 
whatever hinders his advance into purity 
and holiness of life, for the education of 
his spiritual aspirations and faculties so 
that he shall direct his life according to 
ideas and principles which are partly the 
accumulated wisdom of men at their best, 
and partly the truth of God revealed to 
men through the prophets of old and 
through his Son Jesus Christ. Its spirit- 
ual method is the process by which this 



92 The Church in Modern Society. 

end is secured. This process is twofold. 
It is internal and relates to changes in the 
individual which are purely spiritual ; it is 
external and has to do with the education 
of the soul in purity and righteousness 
and usefulness in the world. 

The work of theology has been to for- 
mulate the process by which the soul is re- 
newed, and all the creeds of Christendom 
essentially agree as to the direct and posi- 
tive method by which this end is reached. 
It is necessary to consider what the nat- 
ural condition of man is before it can be 
concluded that a certain remedial agency 
shall be applied to him. It is one of the 
indirect results of tracing the law of de- 
velopment in the animal world that the 
process by which the present maturity of 
man has been reached has come to be 
considered as a natural process. Man is 
not the result of a cataclysm, but the out- 
growth of conditions which reach far be- 
yond the primitive history of the race and 
have to do with the mystery of the origin 



The Spiritual Method of the Church. g$ 

of life. The story of the fall of man as 
told in the Book of Genesis is the Hebrew 
explanation of the origin of man and the 
change that came over our first parents. 
The story of the origin of man and the 
record of his struggle as the survival of the 
fittest is not so much a contradiction of 
the Hebrew record as it is its statement in 
the facts of nature. The fact of the evil 
that is in the world is as distinctly revealed 
in the processes of development as in the 
cosmogony of Genesis. One condition 
supersedes another in the natural world, and 
one condition supersedes another in the 
spiritual world. The names are different, 
but the essential fact is the same. The 
church has given the preference to the 
Hebrew story of the degeneracy of man 
in his moral life, and has itself been 
regarded as the actual process of the re- 
demption of mankind from a fallen con- 
dition ; but it has never denied that its 
whole process was of a positive character, 
that it aimed to do for the spiritual nature 



g4 The Church in Modern Society. 

of man what Nature has aimed to do for 
the consummate end of the creation of the 
world, — the building up of that nature so 
that its higher life shall correspond to the 
process by which man himself is believed 
to have sprung into his present existence 
from a humbler and less complicated or- 
ganism. In the one case, the church re- 
gards mankind as in a spiritual degradation, 
from which its work is to raise the race ; 
in the other, mankind is regarded in its 
totality as subject to the developing pro- 
cess always at work in human history and 
specially realized in the coming of the Son 
of God into the world. The individual 
man may be approached with truth and 
righteousness from either point of view. 
He is a sinner to be redeemed by the death 
of Christ ; or he is a child of God by nat- 
ural process, who is to be educated to enter 
into all that God has made him capable of 
being and knowing. In fact, he is both. 
There is no need of changing the tradi- 
tional theology in order to accommodate 



The Spiritual Method of the Church. g$ 

it the better to the stubborn facts of scien- 
tific truth. Each is to have fair play ; each 
is to be regarded as valid in its own sphere. 
Theology uses one language ; science uses 
another ; but both are processes ordained 
of God for the correction and upbuilding 
of mankind. The essential thing is that 
neither shall stray away from the plain 
facts which concern the spiritual renewal 
of life. 

The church takes the individual man in 
the state in life in which he is, and pro- 
poses to place him in the condition of 
spiritual existence in which he ought to be. 
The church is the Father's home in this 
world for the spiritual education of man- 
kind. Our Lord described its functions 
when he said of it, under the character of 
the Holy Spirit who is its life-giving power, 
that the " Comforter, when he is come, will 
convict the world in respect of sin, and 
of righteousness, and of judgment : of sin 
because they believe not on me ; of right- 
eousness because I go to the Father and 



g6 The Church in Modern Society. 

ye behold me no more ; of judgment be- 
cause the prince of this world is judged." 
Here the central fact in the spiritual world 
is the fact of the Incarnation of Christ, 
who is in this world to deal as God with 
the individual soul ; here the central pur- 
pose is the reaching of personal righteous- 
ness, as the result of this Incarnation, 
through the spiritual forces which are left 
in the world to assist this process ; here the 
Spirit of God is the witness through per- 
sonal character that the Christian family is 
not identified with the prince of this world. 
The promise that the Christian Church 
shall be the collective embodiment of the 
truth which God has vouchsafed for the 
moral and spiritual control of mankind has 
not been broken. Whatever Christianity 
may be, here or there, it is as a whole the 
supreme agency by which the powers of 
evil are overcome and mankind are placed 
in the way of the renewal of spiritual life. 
It works by a spiritual process, but it is a 
spiritual process realized in civil society. 



The Spiritual Method of the Church, gy 

The Incarnation of Christ is the fact 
on which the church rests, and it is by 
virtue of his life and work, and death 
and resurrection and ascension, that the 
church has become the authorized repre- 
sentative of Christ to mankind. It is 
charged with nothing less than the prac- 
tical regeneration of the world. This re- 
generation, if man is a sinful being, with 
his will predisposed to sinful inclinations, 
must be first of all a spiritual renewal 
of the forces of life. Man has always 
heard the voice of his soul crying out for 
God, who seemed afar off; but in Jesus 
Christ God was in man reconciling man 
to God by a double process — by a repre- 
sentative man who bore in his own body 
our sins upon the cross, and by a spiritual 
Person who illustrated in himself the re- 
newal of the human soul through the 
presence in it of divine power. It is 
difficult to express this communication of 
life and power through Jesus Christ to 
the soul of man, because it is a spiritual 



p8 The Church in Modern Society. 

process acting through natural channels. 
One is convinced of the spiritual reality 
only as he has himself an insight into 
what constitutes a spiritual process. There 
are two factors in the relation which an 
individual assumes on uniting himself to 
Jesus Christ, or in becoming a member 
of the Church of Christ through the act 
of baptism. One is the presence of God 
in Christ, promising the remission of 
actual sin, the guidance into truth, and 
the power to do God's will and keep his 
commandments, which presence is indi- 
cated in the words and acts of the person 
who is baptizing ; the other is the person 
coming of his own free act to surrender 
his life, so far as he has control of it, 
into the hands of God, to be his child 
forever, and asking for the help of the 
Holy Spirit that this vow of obedience 
may be registered in heaven. There is 
no spiritual act that goes so thoroughly 
to the depths of the human consciousness 
and searches so truly the hidden things 



The Spiritual Method of the Church, gg 

of the heart as the coming to baptism in 
one's years of full responsibility and sur- 
rendering the whole nature to the rule 
of the spiritual powers which Christ has 
promised as the strength of God for the 
renewed soul. The things of this world 
may again crowd down this new life into 
a small part of one's existence, but nothing 
can ever conceal the moral grandeur of 
the surrender of the soul to God or of its 
renewal through the contact with Jesus 
Christ, who is to us in this solemn act 
individually all that he was in the act of 
his Incarnation to the whole of mankind. 
It may seem that the baptism of a little 
child removes this consciousness of self- 
surrender ; but the smile that used to play 
on the lips of the sainted Keble when he 
took the children of his parish in his arms 
and consecrated them to Christ to be his 
forever, was the conscious feeling that 
they were placed within the church, where 
they would find that what the natural 
mother was in the family the church would 



ioo The Church in Modern Society. 

prove to be as a spiritual mother in their 
ethical and religious education. Ethical 
and spiritual guidance and protection are 
here provided for. The time for self- 
surrender has not come ; it cannot come 
till years of discretion are reached ; but 
it is an immense gain for the character 
that one has been given to Christ in his 
infancy and has been brought up through 
the perils of youth according to that be- 
ginning. It means an education in the 
world but not according to its spirit. If 
there is any reality in spiritual things, it 
further means that spiritual assistance is 
given to the youth to cooperate with the 
instructions of a Christian family in the 
formation of a right character. 

This is the normal way of proceeding ; 
it is the method by which human society is 
gradually transformed by right training of 
the individual into Christian society. It 
brings the fruits of the Incarnation of Christ 
into intimate and personal contact with each 
individual soul. This is the method which 



The Spiritual Method of the Church. 101 

the teachings of Christ sanction for the 
regeneration of society, for the realization 
of the Kingdom of God among men. It 
is the practical attempt to overcome evil 
in our nature by the operation of divine 
grace from the beginning of life. It is 
the control of our nature by a double pro- 
cess which never ceases until our work in 
this world is over. It is, on the one hand, 
an extension of the power of the Incarna- 
tion into our daily existence ; it is, on the 
other hand, the rallying of all our strictly 
human and natural forces to cooperate with 
the Holy Spirit working within us. The 
Eucharist, which is the outward and visible 
sign of the inward and spiritual presence 
of Christ in the soul, is the realization of 
the Incarnation through material forms, 
and marks our faith in him and our in- 
ward resting upon him. It is one of the 
methods of spiritual renewal in our daily 
warfare with the world. It is the visible 
act by which Christians also acknowledge 
their remembrance of what he has done 



102 The Church in Modern Society. 

for them. It is through the Eucharist 
that the pledge of spiritual renewal in 
baptism is reaffirmed by ever fresh repent- 
ance of sin and by ever renewed devotion 
to the discharge of Christian duty. 

From this point of view it is seen that 
the method of the church with reference 
to the individual is to place him where 
he is the recipient of divine grace within 
himself and the subject of spiritual en- 
vironment from without. The Christian 
Church is a world within the world, and 
is yet designed to enfold the world in 
the final conquest of evil within itself. 
Its results are not equal to its aims, but 
it is ever aiming to redeem mankind by 
a spiritual method applied to universal 
human life. The sacraments mean more 
or less to individuals as they read more 
or less into the words of our Lord con- 
cerning their institution; but taken in 
their universal acceptance among Chris- 
tian people, they imply the communication 
of divine grace to the soul of the individual 



The Spiritual Method of the Church. 103 

and the pledge of the one who receives 
them to a consecrated life. This is the 
simplest statement possible of what is in- 
tended by membership in the Church of 
Christ. Spiritual development is realized 
very imperfectly when only the sacramental 
relation is acknowledged, when the possi- 
bilities of character and personal useful- 
ness are not considered. Grace for right 
action comes from God, but power realized 
in action is the fruit of the will subdued 
to "the obedience of Christ.'' The prin- 
ciple of association enters largely into the 
application of the spiritual method to 
actual life. The Kingdom of God is not 
a company of anchorites established to 
perfect their own souls by excluding them- 
selves from contact with their fellow-men. 
It is a social environment of the individual 
so that each one is related to another 
and is strengthened and supported by his 
association with others. It is also more 
than this. It is the development of char- 
acter and purpose and usefulness in in- 



W4 The Church in Modern Society. 

dividuals, so that they not only see life 
from a spiritual point of view, but feel its 
responsibilities in relations to others. The 
Kingdom of God does not exist simply 
for the individual perfection of its mem- 
bers. It is a spiritual brotherhood charged 
with the responsibility of the regeneration 
of human society. The commission of 
our Lord to the Apostles was to go into 
the whole world and make the fact and 
the power of the Incarnation known to 
every person. His parables taught what 
the church was to be in its relations with 
civil society. It was as leaven, as the 
seed growing secretly, as the mustard- 
seed in its powers of expansion, as the 
shepherd seeking the lost sheep. It had 
a mission which was not only given to the 
Apostles and to their successors, but to the 
royal priesthood of the laity who consti- 
tute the household of faith. The mission 
was the conquest of the world, and this 
was not more to win men to the following 
of Christ in their personal obedience to 



The Spiritual Method of the Church. 105 

his teachings than in the consecration of 
their sanctified intelligence to the making 
of society Christian in its atmosphere 
where they lived. 

It is here that the spiritual method has 
been most imperfectly expressed. The 
weakness of human nature has always pre- 
vented the realization of an ideal church, 
and yet it is in the contact with society 
that the conquests of Christianity have been 
made in the past and are to be made in the 
future. It is the realization of the individ- 
ual that he is endowed with influence over 
his fellows, and that by word and deed he 
can transmute that influence into changes 
in their character and in their personal 
motives, which is the final development 
of the Christian to his full powers of activ- 
ity in the sphere in which God has placed 
him. It is the carrying of divine strength 
in personal character which has had most 
influence upon others ; and it is by this 
method of contact with others, who see 
by the marks in one of their fellow-men 



w6 The Church in Modern Society. 

that he has been with Christ, that the 
spiritual touch is conveyed from man to 
man in the open field of the world. It is 
well to regard the church in the aggregate 
as a divine institution, but its human 
strength comes from the development of 
Christian power in the minds and hearts 
of its members. Its action upon society, 
whether in the home, in the circle of 
friends, or in the sphere of public life, is 
what each one expresses to his fellow of 
the divine ideal. There is nothing short 
of personal consecration of mind and heart 
daily to God, and the living with strong 
leaning upon the arm of divine help, to 
keep one in the full realization of what the 
Christian life is in its essence, and to en- 
able one to manifest it to his fellow-men. 
The sacraments are the outward and visi- 
ble pledge of the secret aid that one needs, 
but the daily sacrament of personal com- 
munion with God in the chamber of the 
soul is not to be neglected. Here one is 
fed as with bread from heaven, according 



The Spiritual Method of the Church, wy 

to his need. One who has carried spiritual 
method to this point in his inward expe- 
rience may not live a perfect life, but as 
often as he falls he has the power to rise 
above his weakness and acknowledge amid 
greater efforts after holiness his need of 
increased help from God. The great thing 
is to keep the mind and heart intent upon 
spiritual development through the right 
use of the opportunities of life. God does 
not expect great things of any one. 

We need not bid, for cloister'd cell, 
Our neighbor and our work farewell, 
Nor strive to wind ourselves too high 
For sinful man beneath the sky : 

The trivial round, the common task, 
Would furnish all we ought to ask; 
Room to deny ourselves ; a road 
To bring us daily nearer God. 1 

The saints have been usually those who 
found their way to sainthood along the 

1 Keble's hymn, entitled "Morning," in The Christian 
Year. 



108 The Church in Modern Society. 

path of daily duty. The final result of 
spiritual method, so far as one's usefulness 
is concerned, is to affiliate with the inter- 
ests of ordinary life and make them the 
environment or agencies in forming one's 
Christian character. It is here that our 
personality becomes invested with the 
message that has most weight with our 
fellow-men. There is a call to-day for 
Christian character in industrial and social 
life which can hardly ever have been more 
imperative. The church stands to-day, as 
it did in the primitive days, before a popu- 
lation which feels the need of the patience 
and hopefulness that Christianity imparts 
to a broken industrial and social situation, 
and which longs to see the vindication of 
principles that spring out of the realiza- 
tion of human brotherhood in the natural 
intercourse of life. It is out of the convic- 
tions which men, touched with the spirit of 
Christ, carry into their intercourse with 
their fellows that an adjustment of indus- 
trial troubles is to be reached in which 



The Spiritual Method of the Church, iog 

justice and righteousness are the ruling 
factors. It is here that the church meets 
the world and imparts to men, through the 
personal convictions of its members, the 
principles which cause peace and good 
will to take the place of strife and injus- 
tice. It is here that the spiritual method 
of regenerated society begins to rule the 
world. 




CHAPTER VIII. 

The Church in the Family. 

/^^VNE of the distinctions between an- 
^-^ cient and modern life is that for- 
merly the family was mainly under the 
control of the state and the church, while at 
the present day the family is removed from 
the direct oversight of both and is allowed 
to develop in freedom. The day of absolu- 
tism in church and state has passed away. 
The family is removed from their restric- 
tions, and yet with the increase of its 
freedom of movement it has not better 
supported the other interests of society. 
It is a part of a great whole in which the 
state and the church are, like itself, rep- 
resentative institutions. The special char- 
acteristic of the family to-day is that it is 
an organic part of civil life. The giving of 
freedom to the individual, since the Refor- 



The Church in the Family. 1 1 1 

mation, has helped to restore its primitive 
character. The principle of English law, 
that a man's home is his castle, that the 
father is the head of the household and 
has both the right of control and the re- 
sponsibility for action in his own family, is 
everywhere recognized to-day. The state 
interferes with the family as little as pos- 
sible ; the church as an institution respects 
the independence and the integrity of fam- 
ily life. It is expected that the household 
will not only be a paternal institution, but 
will prepare its younger members for the 
duties of both religious and civil society. 
The ideal of the home contains both the 
institutional and the democratic idea. The 
home to-day in its wholeness is the unit of 
society, and the preservation of its whole- 
ness of operation, of its demand for obedi- 
ence from its younger members, of the free- 
dom of relation between its several units, 
of its security and its openness, is perhaps 
even more essential than when its opera- 
tion was confined within a more limited 



112 The Church in Modern Society. 

range of influence. You cannot watch the 
operation of one family upon another, as 
they combine to make society, without 
feeling the larger significance of the fam- 
ily to-day than before the rise of modern 
life. The growth of civil society has been 
the enfranchisement of the individual, but 
the excessive demands of individual lib- 
erty have threatened to destroy the integ- 
rity of the family relation. The history of 
social life, since the Reformation, has been 
negatively the record of demands upon the 
rights of the family. The natural instincts 
which have preserved it as an institution 
have alone been able to maintain it as a 
social unit. In a free government, where 
the democratic idea prevails alike in church 
and state, the family has felt the encroach- 
ment of the demand for personal freedom, 
Not only have men and women in the mar- 
riage relation stood up for personal rights 
against the concessions of the marriage 
contract, but the individual head of the 
family has been counted, instead of the 



The Church in the Family. r 13 

whole family itself, as the social unit. We 
have forgotten what our laws imply in our 
desire to make the most of the individual 
man. The very play of this individual 
force has encouraged divorce and has stim- 
ulated independence between husband and 
wife, between children and parents, to a 
degree which has materially assailed the 
integrity of the home. While it has been 
more and more conceded and recognized 
that the family is the fundamental institu- 
tion of society, the forces leading to its 
desecration have to a great extent silently 
undermined its vitality. The constructive 
view of the family and of its positive con- 
tribution to social order begins at last to 
be more definitely insisted upon. It has 
been felt that an element has been lost out 
of organic social life, and the restoration of 
the family to the place which it once held 
in ancient society, and which it largely 
lost when church and state limited its ac- 
tion, has perhaps a larger place in present 
thought than at any time since the modern 
period in history began. 



114 The Church in Modern Society. 

In European countries, where marriage 
is largely controlled by tradition, and 
where freedom of choice between man 
and woman is restricted, the family has 
held its ancient place, and its integrity has 
been less disturbed than in a democratic 
country like our own. In a free commu- 
nity the civil aspect of marriage has the 
lead of its religious character. Without a 
national marriage law it has been possible 
to undo in one State what has been done 
in another, and the result has been in re- 
cent years that the family has been more 
corrupted and debased than perhaps any 
other institution that has to do with the 
vital functions of society. The demoraliza- 
tion of the American people to-day is large- 
ly due to the implication, allowed by free- 
dom of divorce, that a marriage is to be 
enforced only to the extent of the wishes 
of the contracting parties. The root and 
germ of the marriage relation is a contract 
for life entered into soberly, advisedly, dis- 
creetly, and in the fear of God, and few 



The Church in the Family. 115 

and far between must be the reasons that 
would sanction a separation. The church 
has been truer to the integrity of the mar- 
riage contract than the state ; and yet the 
state has quite as much at stake as the 
church in the disintegration of the family, 
and in the breaking up of society which 
that disintegration implies. The care of 
children, the division of property, the ties 
of blood which are thicker than water, 
are imperiled by the consent of father 
and mother to live apart, and even the 
moral character of persons thus separated 
is enfeebled. It is here that church and 
state have been robbed in recent times, 
especially in our own country, of the sup- 
port which they naturally derive from the 
social, educational, and moral growths 
which have their root in the family. 

The question before the American peo- 
ple is, how the family may be reinforced 
in its constructive elements ; and ' its 
answer lies in the outreach of the family 
alike to the state and to the church. It is 



/ 1 6 The Church in Modern Society. 

best to consider each of these in its order, 
so that there may be no confusion of treat- 
ment. The state, at this time, will be 
considered in that relation to the family 
which is closest to the relation of the 
church to the same. The state demands 
that its citizens, composed of individuals 
either in families or in a position of organ- 
ized family life, shall be prepared to dis- 
charge the duties of citizenship. The pub- 
lic-school system represents the desire of 
the state to assume that fatherhood of the 
family which is the preparation of the in- 
dividual man for civil life. Here the youth 
of the country are placed " where any per- 
son can find instruction in any study." x 
This is the largest statement of the sphere 
of public instruction. It is a statement 
which is in process of realization on a 
larger scale in this country than has before 
been attempted in the history of the world. 
The free public school is the necessary 
support of democratic ideas. What the 

1 Ezra Cornell's outline idea of Cornell University. 



The Church in the Family. 117 

state assumes, then, in public instruction 
is to mediate between the family and civil 
society, and to prepare the members of 
the one to discharge their duties in re- 
lation to the other. This view of the 
public school is inclusive, and it is the 
only view which can be wholly consistent 
in a country like our own. The public 
school cannot be narrowed to functions 
that are less inclusive than all that goes 
to make a good citizen. It is supposed 
that the heads of a family are competent 
for the position of teachers in which they 
stand toward their children ; but the state, 
in its larger view of parenthood, recognizes 
the duty of complementing the home edu- 
cation with the wider instruction which 
fits one to earn his own living and to 
occupy positions of trust as a citizen. 
Our American political system grows out 
of the free life of the American town, 
and the American town is the result of 
families living in freedom, whose children 
are trained in the common schools. If 



/ 1 8 The Church in Modern Society. 

the local church in this country should 
ever be again what it was in the primitive 
days, coextensive with the political com- 
munity, so that without interfering with 
one another the state and the church 
should be complementary or rather co- 
inclusive in their relation to human life, 
the ideal product of citizenship would be 
reached as it has not been reached else- 
where. We have the elements here that 
lead directly to the highest organization of 
human society, and it is their proper reali- 
zation and adjustment that may be called 
the social and religious problem of the fu- 
ture. To this end all our present thought 
upon society and religion converges. 

The school question in this country is 
thus fundamental in its operation. It is 
so vital to our interests that it is difficult 
to consider it dispassionately. Our re- 
ligious conceptions lag so far behind our 
political beliefs that comparatively few 
citizens are willing to consider the school 
question in its higher and moral, if not 



The Church in the Family. ng 

spiritual, relations. The fear that the 
church will repeat in America the abso- 
lutism that has characterized it for fifteen 
hundred years, is our bugbear. The de- 
termination that religion shall be taught 
in a sectarian sense is largely the ruling 
thought in different denominations. The 
willingness to consider this question with 
the breadth and the wisdom that regard 
society as a whole is largely wanting. 
The spirit of each denomination is to 
seek its own advantage, and not to think 
and act for the whole of society. When 
it is remembered that the sum total of 
Christian membership in this country, or 
perhaps better, the sum total of active 
Christians among us, does not include 
more than perhaps one half of our whole 
population, and that the families and the 
children beyond Christian influence are 
largely dependent upon the public schools 
for whatever fills out the defects of the 
home and builds up boys and girls into 
well-instructed men and women, the ne- 



j 20 The Church in Modern Society. 

cessity of moral, if not spiritual, agreement 
concerning the teachings in the schools 
that affect character is seen in its right 
light. We cannot afford, as a people, in 
reaching a good system of public education, 
to put personal preferences in place of what 
is best for the whole of society, and the 
danger to-day is that one religious body, 
seeking its own advantage, shall withdraw 
its moral and spiritual strength from the 
support of methods which will secure the 
greatest good to the largest number. It 
is the seriousness and the imperativeness 
of the outlook upon American citizenship 
which impel every honest man and good 
citizen to disinterested action in this mat- 
ter. The feeling is deep and strong every- 
where that the instruction given in the 
public schools should be reinforced with 
the moral sanctions which are insisted upon 
in common life. The question of the au- 
thority of morals is partly speculative. 
They may be derived from the will of 
God, as expressed in what is supposed to 



The Church in the Family. 121 

be his revelation to man, but they are 
also expressed in the accumulations of hu- 
man experience which are hardly less than 
the will of God written out in the univer- 
sal principles of human conduct. The one 
may be called the divine sanction and 
the other the natural sanction, but prac- 
tically they harmonize and are one in their 
result. We accept them and act upon 
them, and the sooner our practical agree- 
ments upon moral instruction which has 
this basis are allowed or enforced in the 
public schools, the better will it be for our 
youth who are in them. To-day, notwith- 
standing the changes in methods of in- 
struction by which our schools are brought 
into contact with the things of actual life, 
there is no feature of their work which 
can be more strongly indorsed than the 
moral strength which men, and especially 
women, devoted to teaching, impart by 
practical methods to their pupils. The 
moral and religious influence which is 
conveyed almost unconsciously in the 



122 The Church in Modern Society. 

natural process of instruction cannot be 
over-estimated, and it is in the encourage- 
ment given to teachers of high character, 
and in the freedom of method allowed to 
them, that the results most important to 
the family and to American citizenship 
are to be reached. When this vital work- 
ing of moral and spiritual truth has free 
play in a school-room, where every boy 
and girl enjoys the constant attrition of 
life with life and of race with race, the 
lines for the building up of the best citizen- 
ship may be said to be laid. It is here 
that public education grapples with the 
real issues of American life. The family 
is complemented by the primary school 
which enlarges its work. The primary 
school leads the boy or the girl of ripen- 
ing intelligence, still moving in the atmos- 
phere of home, to the recognition of the 
meaning of life outside of it. The gram- 
mar school is the introduction of three- 
fourths of our youth to practical life, and 
unless the principles which enter into 



The Church in the Family. 12) 

the construction of character are made a 
part of the preparation for taking hold 
of practical things, the kindred points of 
heaven and home are not established in 
young life, and something is wanting in 
public education which is indispensable 
to public virtue. The demand is that edu- 
cation shall be intellectual, industrial, and 
seasoned with character. General Wolse- 
ley admits that the man who brings intel- 
ligence and conscience to his work makes 
the best soldier and the truest patriot ; and 
principles which lead men to give their 
best to defend a country are the principles 
most needed in fitting them to live in it. 
In this outreach from the family and the 
state to education which has a moral basis, 
may be traced the development of the 
family into a leading factor in civil society, 
and it is in keeping the state true to its 
moral duties, without enlisting its aid in 
specific religious action, that public edu- 
cation maintains its greatest usefulness. 
There is no reason why education thus 



124 The Church in Modern Society. 

managed should not meet and satisfy the 
rightful demands of religious people. For 
the purpose which we have in mind as a 
nation, for the building up of men and 
women who shall rise to the full demands 
that can be laid upon them, the public 
education that is true to the teachings 
of heaven and of home is the education 
which every American citizen requires. 
Departures from this line of action are 
departures from what is good for the 
whole of civil society. 

What may the church do to develop 
and renew the higher life of the family ? 
The church approaches the family in two 
directions. It deals with its head and 
with its members as individuals, and it 
recognizes the institution in its social 
unity. If the parents are members of the 
Christian Church by baptism, they repre- 
sent the twofold institutional relationship. 
They have duties as individuals in the 
Christian body, and they stand in a sacred 
and self-respecting relation to the home as 



The Church in the Family. 125 

an independent institution. The family 
in its fullness means children and chil- 
dren's children to the third and fourth 
generation, and it is thus that it becomes 
an organic contribution to society, enter- 
ing into affiliations with church and state 
and supporting both. What the state does 
for its political life the church does for 
its social and spiritual life. It reaches 
out to the family as a corporate unit, and 
it is in and through this institution that 
its influence is most successfully exerted 
and its best work done. In the Christian 
family children are baptized into the life 
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost, and are thus members of the body 
of Christ, to be educated according to 
their baptismal vows. Thus far the Chris- 
tian family and the Christian Church have 
a unity of purpose, and the one finds its 
sphere in the other. The Christian fami- 
lies brought together represent the body 
of Christ in a given locality, and it is 
their united action upon society which is 



126 The Church in Modern Society. 

called the Christian movement in the com- 
munity. They are the light of the world, 
examples to others, illustrations of the 
higher type of family and of social life. 
It was in the early church, as it is in 
the modern church, the influence of these 
families, working out Christian principles, 
which imparted strength to civil relation- 
ships. 

The duties of the church as a teaching 
institution to Christian families are not 
well understood. Every pastor seeks first 
of all to watch over the members of his 
spiritual household, their families and their 
little ones. But the difficulty in the work- 
ing of the church to-day is not so much 
in the care of the members of its own 
household, as in its lack of extensive and 
intensive influence upon the large portion 
of society which is beyond its immediate 
care, and which is to be reached not only 
through the individual, but largely and 
organically through the better use of the 
family. The first thought among Protes- 



The Church in the Family. 127 

tant people has been the work upon the 
individual. Too little consideration has 
been given to the place of the family in 
the reconstruction of society. Our re- 
ligious bodies, divided by imaginary or 
real differences, have emphasized their 
differences in social action. They have 
been prevented, by following out the sec- 
tarian idea, from working as they might 
for the good of the community as a whole. 
They have believed that the regeneration 
of the individual man would be sufficient, 
in a constructive way, for the good of 
society. The stress laid upon conversion 
has been greater than the stress laid upon 
Christian education and upon a large view 
of the relation of the family to practical 
life, so that the ideas of household training 
have been too little inculcated, at least in 
this generation. The Sunday schools have 
led to the ignoring of religious instruction 
in the family, and the Christian family 
has suffered because its regular functions 
have fallen into disuse. People upon 



128 The Church in Modern Society. 

whom moral and spiritual responsibilities 
fall lightly have insisted that their chil- 
dren should be instructed in duties which 
they are unwilling to perform themselves, 
and the contradiction between the influ- 
ence of the home and the teaching of the 
Sunday school is a break in the religious 
order which has been largely fatal to the 
building up of religious character. If the 
efforts of the Christian ministry had been 
directed in the last generation as earnestly 
toward the Christian development of the 
family as they have been aimed toward 
bringing the children of non-Christian fam- 
ilies into the Christian Church, the tone 
of whole American communities would be 
different from what it is to-day. 

To a very great extent the idea of the 
wholeness of the family has dropped out 
of the working Christian system. It is 
not common to hear Sunday instruction 
about the family. The social duty and 
the personal duty is insisted upon, but 
the place of the family in the social 



The Church in the Family. 129 

order, the duty of parents to their 
children, the way in which character is 
transmitted from father to son and from 
mother to daughter, the insistence upon 
the sacredness and purity of family life, 
are ignored alike in the pulpit, in house- 
hold visitation, and in the literature of the 
day. The family has not been treated as 
an institution, and the church has too 
often ignored its functions as a social and 
spiritual force in the community. It has 
been treated as a concourse of individual 
units, and the value of a congregation of 
families for breathing a spiritual purpose 
into the whole of human life has not been 
appreciated. The reviving of the church 
itself as an institution, and the consider- 
ation of what it may do to increase the 
efficiency of the family as an organic factor 
in society, and the looking at individuals 
more in their relation to institutional work, 
will put a new face upon the community. 
The family is the key alike to society and 
to the individual. Unless the corporate 



ijo The Church in Modern Society. 

ideas of life are reintroduced, individuals 
are in relation to one another as grains of 
sand. They lack coherence, constructive 
influence, and associated power. 

The neglected field of the church in so- 
ciety is in its failure to treat people out- 
side of the church from the family point 
of view. The individual conversion is not 
less to be sought for, but the individual 
Christian should be better educated to dis- 
charge his duties as a member of society, 
and especially as one who may organize 
and guide society through the family. His 
higher education as a Christian citizen, as 
one in organic relations with the social 
order, should also not be neglected. It 
is in overlooking this kind of education 
that the teachers in our churches have 
cut short their own influence. The state 
values the citizen in proportion to his con- 
tribution to the social forces ; the church 
should value the individual, not so much 
as counting one in its membership, as for 
his power to organize society through the 



The Church in the Family. ijr 

family upon a Christian basis. Every man 
and woman represents the possibility of 
organizing society through the family and 
of being able to guide and direct the life 
of the next generation. The higher life of 
the community depends upon the educa- 
tion of each individual in the organic re- 
lation of the family to society and upon 
his personal influence in maintaining it. 
We have so far drifted away from this 
conception of the church in its relation to 
the family life outside of its membership 
that a large part of the community is treat- 
ed, from the Christian point of view, at 
arm's length. The word is not spoken, and 
the influence is not exerted, where it does 
the most good. Families are organized, 
their younger members reach maturity, and 
new families are organized outside of the 
existing churches, where for two or three 
generations, if not more, hardly any influ- 
ences of the Christian Church are brought 
to bear upon the family idea. The moral 
and spiritual responsibility of the parent 



Ij2 The Church in Modern Society. 

for the children is not recognized, and the 
teaching which the church should bring 
to the household does not exist. What- 
ever, in such a case, may be done for an 
individual member of the family, its higher 
corporate life is neither aroused nor di- 
rected. You may go through community 
after community, through hamlet and vil- 
lage and town and city, and the absence 
of the impact of the church in its organic 
strength upon families is so characteristic 
as to be almost universal. How can reli- 
gious societies flourish when neglecting 
the direction of an institution which is fun- 
damental to their existence ? How can the 
grip of the Christian minister be felt in a 
community, when he does not seek to lead, 
through the family, its organic life ? How 
can the young, who look to parents for the 
teaching word of power and guidance, be 
restrained from evil influences and made 
to respect Christian organization, when 
the clergy, who should naturally guide life, 
do not work through the family ? The 



The Church in the Family. 1 33 

inefficiency here pointed out is due very 
largely to a radical defect in the inter- 
pretation of the duty of the church itself. 
It grows out of the undue stress that is 
laid upon the conversion of the individual 
and the undue disregard of the construc- 
tive relation in which the church stands 
to the family and to the community. Until 
the church puts its strength into a broader 
conception of its legitimate functions in 
the family, until it takes as wide a view of 
the family for a religious purpose as the 
state takes of it for a political purpose, its 
influence will be like the work of a man 
with one hand, with the other unused, or 
paralyzed, at his side. 




A 



CHAPTER IX. 
The Church among the People. 
NOTE of the church is its univer- 



sality. It adjusts itself to all so- 
cial conditions, and every one has standing 
room within its limits. It is as compre- 
hensive in its scope as the whole of man- 
kind, and though it has never yet ruled 
the social world, there is nothing in its 
character to prevent this conquest. The 
principles upon which the church rests, in 
its relation to society, are the principles 
which our Lord, as the leader of humanity, 
laid down for the conduct of his disciples. 
These are not in opposition to the natural 
principles which have grown up among 
men in the form of mutual concessions 
for the common weal ; they recognize all 
natural rights and insist upon lifting them 
up to the ideal excellence of universal 



The Church among the People. 135 

righteousness. The teachings of the 
Christian Church have constructed for 
mankind a social order which is as yet 
imperfectly realized in the world, but is 
in constant process of becoming universal. 
This ideal standard of order, embodied in 
the church as a living principle, has been 
its great distinction as a social institution 
throughout its entire history. In the 
earlier Christian ages the social life of 
the people was controlled by the church 
against the corruption of the Greek and 
Roman world ; at a later time the same 
social order in the Middle Ages gave 
tone and character to civilization ; just 
before the Reformation the church stood 
up as the defender of the individual 
against the nations of the earth; at the 
Reformation itself the Protestant part of 
the church allied itself with political in- 
stitutions in order that the rights of the 
individual might be more distinctly main- 
tained in free society ; and even in the 
Roman Church of those days the great 



i ^6 The Church in Modern Society. 

Christian brotherhoods and sisterhoods 
retained under limitations the principles 
which had been transmitted from the 
beginning and had given the church the 
power to control the social world. 

The Christian Church has never been 
without influence in society ; indeed, here 
have been the sources of its power. Its 
contact with society, as well as its control 
of it, has been a varying element, though 
it is here that its human strength has 
been concentrated. But since the Refor- 
mation there has been a separation be- 
tween things secular and things sacred, 
so that the church, with more apparent 
freedom than before, has seemed to sep- 
arate itself from society instead of con- 
trolling it, and to reach serenity of spirit 
at the expense of its usefulness as a social 
factor. Dogma has been exalted above 
charity, and a correct belief has been 
more insisted on than a saintly life. Civil 
society, even within our own time, has 
enlarged its sphere ; there are opportuni- 



The Church among the People. 1 37 

ties to do more things to-day than there 
were yesterday, and human affairs are 
constantly becoming more and more com- 
plex. In the meanwhile, what are called 
the American churches have been in- 
creasingly specialized away from what 
is the central function of the Catholic 
Church, which is to make this institution 
coextensive with the whole of human life, 
and comprehensive enough to include all 
sorts and conditions of men. This spe- 
cialization of functions is the glory of the 
undivided church, but the bane of a sec- 
tion of it. The difficulty with the Amer- 
ican working church is that it enlarges 
its special work at the expense of its 
central functions ; it draws the blood away 
from the heart and does not return it 
there to receive new life. The constant 
criticism of our American Christianity 
is that in its special forms it is neither 
broad nor strong enough to do the social 
work which it undertakes. Its several 
branches do not control the social world 



1 38 The Church in Modern Society. 

or direct social action as the undivided 
church would. They have neither au- 
thority nor influence sufficient for this 
purpose. What the Christian Church in 
the United States lacks more than any- 
thing else is the ability to carry weight 
into life. It lacks the consciousness of 
mission ; it is not animated by an over- 
mastering purpose ; its authority is not 
deferred to in the social world ; in but 
few instances is there a large and wise 
outreach to the central things in social 
life, or such a wise shaping of the in- 
fluences which direct the lives of men 
that the collective church inspires them 
with a consciousness of its mission and 
with reverence for its teachings, if not 
obedience to them. The Christian Church 
among the people of America lacks pres- 
tige ; it needs distinction, emphasis, the 
touch of divine grace, the word from God. 
It is in the w r orld, but not of the world, 
while its mission is to subdue the world 
to itself. 



The Church among the People. 1 39 

The church is not here so much at 
fault as are the methods by which the 
organizations of to-day are brought into 
contact, or rather kept from adequate 
contact, with social life. Light is thrown 
upon this point by the contrast between 
the church and the state in the way in 
which they influence society. The state 
is at once permissive and restrictive in 
its action. It allows certain things to 
be done, and it forbids others. It treats 
the whole body politic as citizens. No 
one within the nation can escape from its 
control or break its laws with impunity. 
The church, if it were coextensive with 
the nation and united in its action, would 
exert the same influence over the spiritual 
life which the state exerts over the po- 
litical and economic life of the people. 
What the state insists on as morals the 
church insists upon as religion. The 
drawback is that the church, in its dis- 
united sections, lacks the power over 
society which is exerted by the state. 



140 The Church in Modern Society. 

There is no system of temporal rewards 
and punishments behind it. It is simply 
a voluntary agency. Its ban of excom- 
munication means nothing. It comes 
into society as a free, inspiring, and uni- 
versal influence. It can secure only a 
voluntary obedience to its principles of 
right and wrong. It reaches the people 
mainly on their emotional and moral side, 
and it is as a moral agency that it carries 
weight into social life. To individuals it 
offers a way of personal salvation ; to 
society it offers a changed environment. 
There are many theories of social rights, 
but the position of the church in society 
does not square with any theory what- 
soever. It is broader than any theory 
allows. It looks upon society as a whole ; 
it refers special actions to the central 
principles set forth in the teachings of 
Christ ; and it is also entirely non-parti- 
san in its action. This conception of the 
church is higher and broader than our 
common experience of its action in the 



The Church among the People. 141 

communities with which we are acquainted, 
but it is no higher or broader than what 
is required, if it takes its place as an in- 
stitution which bears directly and con- 
structively upon the whole of human life. 
Where it has this large significance as an 
institution, its influence is felt at once in 
carrying out a higher principle of action. 
Here it may take the side of the rich ; 
there it is on the side of the poor ; again 
it may mediate between the two and 
show the common ground that belongs 
to both ; at another time its task is to 
lead the whole community to a new stand- 
ard of life ; it can have no one unvarying 
sense, no uniform policy, no universal rule 
of action ; it must conform itself every- 
where to the circumstances which modify 
the action of a universal principle. The 
position of justice and righteousness here 
embodied in what men call the church 
gives it an influence over the people 
which comes home to the aspirations and 
longings of every right-minded man ; and 



142 The Church in Modern Society. 

it is as an institution in the social world 
that its claims find glad recognition. This 
or that local section may imperfectly show 
what the universal church would do, but 
when we regard it as impersonating the 
interests of human society, and allow it 
to work freely for the protection and 
growth of individual rights, its authority 
and influence everywhere command re- 
spect. 

The church thus active in society be- 
comes naturally the representative of 
moral authority in social, educational, and 
industrial questions. Its authority is not 
absolute, but it represents that sense of 
justice and Tightness which is latent in 
the minds and hearts of all men. Per- 
haps at no previous time has there been 
a stronger demand for the insistence upon 
the ideal order which the church would 
like to establish for the perfecting of the 
community. The distinctive feature of 
our own time is that every political, eco- 
nomic, or industrial question rises dis- 



The Church among the People. 143 

tinctly and inevitably into a moral ques- 
tion. No man lives unto himself alone ; 
no movement in society is without its 
bearing upon the whole of human thought 
and action ; no questions which divide 
the industrial world can be justly and 
fairly settled without carrying men in 
their final solution up to the plane of 
Christian principle ; even political conten- 
tions, always partisan in their inception 
and development, rise inevitably into great 
moral issues ; and the relations of capital 
and labor, whenever seriously discussed, 
find their solution in the overpowering 
moral principles which soften the asperi- 
ties and remove the misunderstandings 
between the two factors. In the days 
that are upon us, and in those which are 
to come, the Christian Church occupies 
socially a unique position. The oppor- 
tunity of the church through its clergy 
and through the living up to its principles 
is to tell the capitalist not less than the 
laboring man what he ought to do, and 



144 The Church in Modern Society. 

to bring the two parties to see the situa- 
tion from a more central point of view. 
Without committing itself to either party 
and without acting as umpire between 
the two, it has been possible, wherever 
the Christian Church has been in healthy 
and responsive relations to the community, 
to work successfully for the settlement of 
industrial disputes. It is here that the 
Christian Church represents the spiritual 
guidance of social life ; it is here that it 
recognizes and maintains the position in 
the community where the assertion of its 
functions gives it directing power among 
the people. Where it is sold out to a 
class, where a parish represents people 
chiefly of one kind, where local prejudice 
is allowed to give color to a congregation, 
this influence and authority are not mani- 
fested. The severest thing that can be 
said against local congregations in all 
parts of the collective American church 
is that they are too often under the con- 
trol of men and women who are without 



The Church among the People. 145 

sympathy with those who are engaged 
in a life of daily toil. This is not the 
fault of the church ; it is the fault of the 
people who for the time being give par- 
ticular parishes their local tone and color. 
All that is needed in any of these cases 
is to secure different leadership and change 
the spirit of a particular congregation. 

The Christian Church gains in respect 
and in usefulness in proportion as it be- 
comes to society at large what it is per- 
sonally to the individual in the direction 
of his inward life. It reaches society by 
entering into it and organizing its working 
ideas. This is accomplished, not by de- 
nouncing its errors so much as by put- 
ting the salt of a new life into its springs 
of power, and creating everywhere the 
conviction that the church is on the help- 
ing side of every man who tries to live 
up to the best that is in him. When we 
treat the spiritual method of the church, 
we confess to the cooperation of the 
divine will with the human will in the 



146 The Church in Modern Society. 

making of a new man in Jesus Christ ; 
when we treat of the regeneration of 
society and the method by which this is 
accomplished, it is understood that moral 
elements not less than spiritual forces 
enter into the environment of the com- 
munity and constitute its atmosphere, so 
that its average tone is raised and men 
feel it as they drink in the inspiration 
of the air on a June morning. It makes 
little difference whether one form of eccle- 
siastical polity or another is followed in 
bringing the church into contact with the 
people. In a country like our own the 
polity in closest harmony with democratic 
institutions has the advantage, while that 
which represents the principle of heredi- 
tary descent or spiritual succession is often 
felt to be out of touch with the masses ; 
but what one polity gains in the sym- 
pathy of a common method is supplied by 
the other in treating the w T hole question 
of religion with the breadth and simplicity 
which gather up and sanctify all that is 



The Church among the People. 14J 

best in life. Both are alike in their rec- 
ognition of a common work among the 
people, which must be controlled by an 
abounding love for the souls of men, and 
by such an interest in their personal hap- 
piness in this world that every possible 
effort is put forth to make it suitable for 
them to live in. In practical experience, 
both the monarchical and the democratic 
church succeed because each recognizes 
in its own way the spiritual needs of the 
people and meets them with the wisdom 
and sympathy that Christ has taught them 
to use. There are advantages in each form 
of polity ; and were the advantages of each 
one used to make up the deficiencies in 
the other, the power and efficiency of the 
working church in modern life would be 
immensely increased. 

Wherever the masses do not attend 
church, the question is whether the church 
itself is in a condition to invite them or 
to take care of them if they came. Our 
Lord said : " If I be lifted up from the 



148 The Church in Modern Society. 

earth I will draw all men unto me." This 
promise is always realized when the in- 
finite beauty and attraction of his life and 
death, and the inspiring power which he 
imparts to our own lives, are fairly and 
truly presented to mankind. The question 
of most importance to-day is not whether 
the people are in this or that religious 
body, but whether our churches, individu- 
ally or collectively, are so thoroughly con- 
trolled by the spirit of the Master that 
the people who are hungering and thirst- 
ing for the bread of life can be truly fed 
by resorting to them. Until a great re- 
form has been wrought in the present 
relations of the church to society, until 
the thought of Christian leaders has been 
greatly widened and their methods admit 
of greater diversity in practical work, until 
the largeness and freedom of the whole 
church are applied to the administration 
of special sections of it, the people them- 
selves will not find in the sections that 
specially appeal to them the divine teach- 



The Church among the People. 149 

ing which calls them instinctively to the 
Master's service. The bringing of the 
people to the church is very largely ac- 
complished when the church is prepared 
to receive them, when its doors are opened, 
when it reaches out the helping hand, 
when it asks people low down in life to 
come up higher, when it stands in the 
community for making more of people 
than they were before. The reaching of 
all sorts and conditions of men is largely 
a question of method, of adaptation, and 
of sympathy. In one respect the method 
of the Protestant churches has improved. 
The damnatory motives once insisted upon 
in order to lead people to righteousness 
of life are now seldom urged. The Chris- 
tian method, the positive method, the 
method that increases the meaning of life, 
the method that strengthens ■ the will to 
live rightly, begins to be employed, where 
Christians are thoroughly in earnest, with 
wonderful efficiency and power. The 
church itself, when truly understood, is 



I jo The Church in Modern Society. 

as broad in its spirit as the social life 
of the whole community, and its methods 
of dealing with individuals should be as 
flexible as the differences of temperament 
demand. A great result has been accom- 
plished when the impression has been 
created in a neighborhood that the reli- 
gious organization which appeals to the 
people is in helpfyl sympathy with their 
needs and conditions. When men and 
women feel that it covers the whole of 
their life and treats it in such a way as 
to make it a new life, so that they are 
inspired by a broader, freer, truer spirit 
in their homes, among their friends, and 
in their social experiences, the life of 
Christ has been renewed in them. The 
aim of the Christian Church should be 
not only to renew and spiritualize indi- 
vidual and family life, but to make the 
whole of society as nearly as possible the 
reflection of this sort of life. It is by 
such a method that Christianity makes 
the life of men larger, leads them into a 



The Church among the People. 151 

riper Christian experience, unites one class 
with another by the extension of a kindly- 
spirit among them until each one's life 
becomes more interesting to himself and 
more attractive to others, and persons who 
have had slight opportunity to make much 
of themselves find that their whole contact 
with the world is purer, fresher, and better 
than it was before. Where these condi- 
tions are established, the community not 
less than the family and the individual is 
inspired with a new purpose, and Christi- 
anity becomes lovely in the eyes of all men. 
Into details of method in reaching the 
people it is perhaps not best to go. The 
points of successful Christian work may 
be considered under the heads of worship, 
sympathy, opportunity, and reality ; but in 
each locality or community the treatment 
is so special, even under these suggestions, 
that it could not be successfully treated 
without making a treatise on pastoral the- 
ology. The work of the Christian leader 
to-day is very largely in the removal of 



152 The Church in Modern Society. 

misunderstanding as to the social position 
of all the churches. The line of separa- 
tion which has been allowed in this coun- 
try to mark off church-members from their 
friends in the world needs to be taken 
out of social life ; the patronage which 
ministers and people often extend toward 
those who are lower down in life needs 
to be replaced by the appeal to what is 
best in all men ; the church ought to be 
presented not so much as passing judg- 
ment upon men's sins as offering a method 
by which they may escape from them and 
rise above them ; and Dr. Arnold's prin- 
ciple in governing Rugby School, which 
was to accept every boy on his best side 
and for the best that was in him, should 
be the rule rigidly adhered to by all who 
hold commissions for helping and keep- 
ing the souls of their fellow-men. The 
spiritual lines which seem to divide people 
into sheep and goats are not so distinct 
when we go down into the realities of life 
as they seem to be when they are laid 



The Church among the People. 153 

down by religious doctrinaires ; and when 
Christian leaders or teachers go forth 
among men to arouse in them an attrac- 
tion for the life which they are capable 
of leading, they are not often allowed to 
return from their seed -sowing without 
bringing the sheaves of the harvest with 
them. 




CHAPTER X. 

The Church in the Nation. 

' | "HE nation organizes the life of man 
■*- for civil authority. It is " the sphere 
of a realized freedom, in which alone the 
life of man fulfills itself, and it is to give 
expression to all that is compassed in life. 
It moves toward the development of a 
perfect humanity. Its symbol is the city 
of an hundred gates, through which there 
passes not only the course of industry and 
trade, but the forms of poets and prophets 
and soldiers and sailors and scholars — 
man and woman and child in the unbroken 
procession of the people. Its warrior 
bears the shield of Achilles, on which 
there are not only the figures of the mart 
and sea and field, the loom and ship and 
plow, but the houses and the temples 



The Church in the Nation. 155 

and the shrines and the altars of men, 
the types of the thought and endeavor 
and conflict and hope of humanity. The 
condition of the being of the nation, as 
the power and the minister of God in 
history, is in its moral personality ; in 
this it is constituted in history as the 
moral order of the world, and for the 
fulfillment of that order. The assertion 
of the moral being of the nation has been 
the foundation of that which is enduring 
in politics, and has been embodied in the 
political thought and will which alone 
have been constructive in the state." 1 
The state is to secure justice, maintain 
order, establish freedom for the individual, 
furnish scope for social ends, render pos- 
sible more and more the rule of the people 
by the people, which means government 
by mutual consent, and thus represents 
the nation as the realization of the moral 
idea in the life of self-conscious freedom, 
which is the order of the moral world ; 

1 The Natio7i> by Elisha Mulford, LL.D., pp. 21, 22. 



1 56 The Church in Modern Society. 

and this is the working out of the full 
idea of Hegel, who says : " There is one 
conception in religion and the state, 
and that is the highest of man." 1 This 
comprehensive outline of the province of 
the nation in the control of civil society 
has its complement in the way in which 
the church organizes the whole commu- 
nity as a people of God who are to be 
treated and cared for not only as members 
of a moral commonwealth in which they 
are to be trained for the duties of citizen- 
ship, but as inheritors of the kingdom of 
heaven. Thus the twofold relationship of 
the church to society, its part in building 
up the state in the moral forces which 
maintain a high order of citizenship, and 
its part in establishing the spiritual re- 
public of God on earth, has always been 
maintained ; but too often it has been 
realized by the domination of the church 
over the state or the state over the 
church. The papal theory which ruled 

1 Hegel's Philosophie tier Religion^ vol. i. p. 170. 



The Church in the Nation. 757 

the Middle Ages and was maintained un- 
improved down to the Reformation, was 
the supremacy of the church over the 
state. The same theory was the Puritan 
ideal, as partially carried out during the 
period of the English commonwealth, and 
more fully established in Puritan New 
England. Neither in papal countries nor 
in Puritan New England has it been pos- 
sible to realize this theory in modern so- 
ciety ; it did not give to the individual 
sufficient freedom either as a citizen of 
the state or as a member of the house- 
hold of God. The English ideal of the 
church as coextensive with the nation, as 
bound up with it so that the one should 
not act without the consent of the other, 
is entirely consistent with the develop- 
ment of the church and state in modern 

• 

life. It is easy to see that when civil so- 
ciety had only begun to enter upon its 
present development, the English Church, 
which looked after the life of the whole 
English people, filled a place in their in- 



158 The Church in Modern Society. 

stitutional history and maintained a spirit- 
ual freedom for the individual which was 
the counterpart of his moral freedom as 
an English citizen. The religious institu- 
tions of the country were rightly coordi- 
nate with its political institutions. The 
point in which their relation differed then 
from what it is growing to be and has be- 
come to-day in a country like our own, is 
that a legal connection was then main- 
tained which has now been diminished into 
a relation of mutual consent or friendly 
understanding. In the different European 
states where the Roman Catholic is the 
controlling religion, the same tendency to 
the mutual release of church and state 
from obligations to each other is to be 
noted. Church and state must always be 
two leading and controlling factors in hu- 
man society, and it is in their working 
in mutual freedom that the highest aim 
of each is to be attained in modern life. 

We have reached to-day in the United 
States that free development of church 



The Church in the Nation. 159 

and state where each is separated from 
the other in a practically uniform relation, 
where each is in non-legal but constant 
intercourse with the other, where the state 
deals only with the temporal and the 
church with the eternal issues. Both have 
to do with society as a whole ; both confer 
with men as individuals. This does not 
mean the establishment of an imperiwn 
in imperio ; it is simply that the spheres 
of the two jurisdictions are independent, 
though often inclusive. The state is free ; 
the church is free ; and it is understood 
that there are to be no antagonisms be- 
tween them. The people in this country 
would not tolerate a closer relation. What 
the state does for political society the 
church does for religious society. It is 
in the largest possible definition of the 
national position of the collective church 
toward the spiritual consciousness of the 
people that the point of view is reached 
where the work of the church is seen in 
a right light as a spiritual factor in the 



i6o The Church in Modern Society. 

nation. It has the moral consciousness of 
the nation in its keeping. The country 
cannot go wrong upon great moral issues 
without a protest from the collective 
church. It cannot fulfill its charge, its 
duty to the individual, without arousing 
that enthusiasm for the welfare of the 
community which is the secret and invisi- 
ble impulse in the Kingdom of God. The 
church is the realization, in its continuous 
life, of the religious belief of the Positivist, 
that all the accretions of wisdom which go 
to enlarge the sphere of human govern- 
ment are handed over in succession to each 
generation, thus increasing the advantages 
of life in the future. It emphasizes in 
freedom the spiritual consciousness of the 
individual and educates it as the personal 
conscience. The nation is also a moral 
personality. Dr. Mulford says: "The 
condition of the realization of personality 
is the same in the nation as in the in- 
dividual. This condition in each is the 
clearness and fullness in which it compre- 



The Church in the Nation. 161 

hends its purpose and is centred in it. 
The source of strength is, as in the indi- 
vidual, in working faithfully after the type 
of its own individuality and in bringing 
this to its free and clear development. . . . 
The nation as a moral person is in itself 
called as a power in the coming of that 
kingdom in which there is the moral gov- 
ernment of the world and in whose con- 
ception there is the goal of history." 1 The 
nation, like the individual, finds its devel- 
opment in an integral moral life. The 
church advances pari passu on this same 
line, but after a spiritual method in its 
dealing with the whole of human society. 
It is only as we see the collective church 
from this point of view that the greatness, 
the dignity, the responsibility, and the 
moral grandeur of its functions are made 
to appear. 

It detracts from the estimate of what 
may be called a national church that its 
divisions, in this country at least, are so 

1 The Nation, p. 19. 



1 62 The Church in Modern Society, 

numerous that it not only presents no 
collective front, no well-adjusted order of 
procedure, but is to a great extent a mass 
of discordant factions warring with one 
another over distinctions which are be- 
neath its notice and impair its efficiency 
as a republic of God. Regarded from this 
point of view, the fragments of organi- 
zations that call themselves churches do 
not unite people and do not build up 
in them the conception of the Catholic 
Church in the nation which is here set 
forth. The disintegration of Christian 
society through its divisions has previously 
been discussed. The larger portion of 
Christian people sincerely lament these 
separations and note in them a constant 
waste of spiritual power and strength. 
The country is overrun with spiritual en- 
thusiasts and with religious rivalries which 
make sober people sick unto death of 
even the name of religion, and amid this 
confusion they look almost in vain for its 
reality. Needless as these divisions seem 



The Church in the Nation. i6j 

to be, the time has come when conserva- 
tive people are intolerant of them. It is 
to be noted that the come-outers in this 
country from the established and respon- 
sible organizations have not only never 
organized anything to take their place, 
but have dissipated their spiritual strength 
in social reforms which, after the best is 
said of them, are secondary to the power 
for reform and renewal which the collec- 
tive church attains. It is further to be 
noticed that, great as is the tendency to 
individualism in religion to-day, the only 
forms of the Christian Church among us 
maintaining not only the right of way 
but a strong and steady increase are 
those which are identified as the histori- 
cal churches. The great race instinct 
among the American people may be 
abused by the licentiousness and prodi- 
gality of its individual manifestations, but 
it is too strong in its conservative move- 
ment, and its roots are too deep in the 
life of society, to trifle always with the 



164 The Church in Modern Society. 

constructive spiritual life of the nation. 
Though much in our modern Protestan- 
tism prevents civil society from being con- 
trolled by the large principles that take 
in the general order of things and work 
for it as a unit, there is a recognition 
everywhere, too often imperfect, often 
enunciated by a minority, perhaps more 
often heard outside the churches than 
within them, voiced by religious leaders 
here and there rather than by the officers 
of the church organization, but on the 
whole the audible expression of a con- 
viction which more and more carries 
weight into life, — that the religion which 
is worth anything in this country is a 
religion which aims at the unity of life 
and deals with the whole of civil society. 
Nothing short of this is satisfactory. Dis- 
appointing as things seem on the surface, 
whether in the country town with its 
church-bells clanging for discordant creeds, 
or in the city with its confused religious 
dialects, — if the whole aim which is im- 



The Church in the Nation. 165 

plied in this discordant work is taken into 
account, — the substantial unity of things 
may be recognized, and the fragmentari- 
ness of our Christian aim may rightly be 
regarded as a temporary and transient 
phase. In the better ordering of Christian 
society the church must again reassert 
and maintain the principles of unity and 
order which have been, humanly speaking, 
the secret of its strength, side by side 
with the nation, from the beginning of 
the Christian system. 

What does the collective church do for 
the state ? It brings the law of God to 
bear upon society. The aim of the state 
finds its end in itself ; it seeks to improve 
a certain order and hand it down to pos- 
terity. The church's aim and end is the 
restoration of man to God ; it is a con- 
structive purpose ; it does something that 
legislation cannot do and does not attempt 
to do. It imparts a higher principle to 
our present organic life. Illustrations of 
what the collective church does beyond 



1 66 The Church in Modern Society. 

what the state does are found in the rela- 
tion of each to the temperance and the 
prison reforms. The state punishes the 
criminal and the drunkard for their overt 
acts against its laws ; the church under- 
takes a higher and more radical work ; 
it would reform both the drunkard and the 
criminal by increasing their self-defense 
against temptations, and would plant the 
principle of temperance not only in the 
individual mind and heart but in the con- 
sent of society to diminish if not entirely 
remove the temptation itself. The state 
punishes, but the church undertakes to 
reform and renew life. It helps to repress 
the natural evil in man, and to this end 
it exerts authority from man to man over 
the public conscience. It speaks to the 
school, the municipality, the legislature, 
the congress, and when it is fairly repre- 
sentative in its voice it expresses the 
moral consciousness of the people, the 
bonds of righteousness and duty toward 
God and man. Taken as a whole, the 



The Church in the Nation. 1 6y 

church in this attitude represents a certain 
authority. Its voice is like that of the 
watchman telling of the night in the pro- 
phecy of Isaiah. This watchfulness, in its 
collective capacity, extends over society 
like the shadow of a great rock in a 
weary land. It represses evil ; it stimulates 
righteousness ; it enforces principles ; it 
carries its enthusiasm into the community ; 
it inspires men with the purpose of leader- 
ship, and makes their voices heard in 
clarion notes throughout the world. Wher- 
ever the church in its collective capacity 
is strong, wherever it speaks with un- 
diminished emphasis for principles, wher- 
ever it is heard and felt in civil society 
in a way that commands obedience, it not 
only asserts its power upon the whole com- 
munity and gives tone to its life, but there 
is a retroactive influence which is felt 
within itself, and the high pitch of its 
moral reach becomes a new incentive to 
its own vitality. The church, at any given 
day or in any given generation, exhibits 



1 68 The Church in Modern Society. 

departures from this position of authority. 
It is in the world and yet not of the 
world; its principle is that of St. Paul, 
that the right thing is to use this world 
as not abusing it. The highest function 
of the church is to create the purpose in 
religious society of using the things of this 
world according to the best plans, and it 
is in proportion as this aim is reached 
that the church as a moral organization 
has leverage in the community. Here 
is its great conservative influence. It 
holds back from wrong; it maintains 
moral principles ; it is the living teacher 
of righteousness ; it is always conserva- 
tive ; its organization is to hold fast the 
right things ; it conserves existing good ; 
it represents the power behind the social 
order which expresses the law of God. 
But this is not the only function that the 
church discharges in the community. It 
is in its organization a definite ministry to 
civil society. As an army has its fore- 
runners to indicate the direction of its 



The Church in the Nation. i6g 

movement and to pioneer the way, so the 
church, in its spiritual leaders who see 
truth singly and in advance of others, has 
a pioneer company who lead its energies 
into new fields of conquest from age to 
age. These pioneers are found here and 
there, — Samuel among the prophets, 
Elisha the Tishbite outside, Amos among 
the herdsmen of Tekoa, men who have 
divine intuitions, men who hold counsel 
with God for the people, and whose spir- 
itual insight and discernment are beacon 
lights to the people of God who tread wea- 
rily in the dusty pathways of the world. 
Such men are found in the collective 
church to-day, and it is in their individual 
and yet representative utterances that the 
nation receives rebuke or encouragement. 
Bishop White and Bishop Alonzo Potter 
in the Anglican, and Archbishop Hughes 
and Dr. Brownson in the Roman com- 
munion, have emphasized the work of the 
Christian Church in the nation and helped 
to deepen the kindly relations between the 



ijo The Church in Modern Society. 

two. Dr. Lyman Beecher and Dr. Chan- 
ning in an earlier day, and Dr. Bushnell 
and Theodore Parker for a later genera- 
tion, have occupied a similar position, and 
the present bishop of New York showed 
himself at the recent centennial celebra- 
tion of the inauguration of our govern- 
ment the worthy son of Alonzo Potter in 
rebuking the ascendency of political cor- 
ruption in public life. But the church in 
the United States is simply a coordinate 
power with the state, having the same 
field of civil society to work in, but pur- 
suing its own course and living for the 
realization of its own ends. Its jurisdic- 
tion is moral and persuasive, not author- 
itative or judicial. It controls the nation 
only as it controls the individuals that 
constitute the nation. In education, in 
reform, in the treatment of crime, in the 
direction of society, in guiding the na- 
tional conscience, the church is a moral 
and spiritual factor with no authority be- 
yond its national majesty and its appeal 



The Church in the Nation. iji 

to the individual. The result is that its 
work lies almost exclusively within its 
own sphere ; and when it realizes its ends 
in a large way, it renders its best support 
to the nation. 

It is difficult to say in a few words what 
the essential character of the American 
religion is. It was denned by that knight 
of the free lance, the late John Weiss, 
thus : " America is an opportunity to make 
a religion out of the sacredness of the in- 
dividual." 1 ' Of American opportunity he 
says : " Its religion and its polity came 
down together, quite unsuspected by any 
temporary forms or stages either, and may 
be found lying together on the site they 
have reached, whenever we penetrate 
beneath sectarian and democratic drift." 2 
His cardinal point is that " the sacredness 
of the individual is the basis of American 
religion." There is to him "nothing out- 
side of the individual." This is what the 
separatist says. The churchman is at the 

1 American Religion, by John Weiss, p. 47. 2 Ibid. p. 56. 



1J2 The Church in Modern Society. 

other pole, while, between the churchman 
on the one hand and the separatist on the 
other, there are a thousand opinions which 
cover with constant variations the inter- 
vening space. In this kaleidoscope of 
changing influences it is difficult to for- 
mulate the distinctive principles which are 
giving shape to American religious thought 
and life. Each one sees from his own 
outlook and thinks that his point of ob- 
servation is at the centre. The outlook 
is so large, and when at last compre- 
hended includes so many interests, that 
one shrinks from a dogmatic definition ; 
and where religious beliefs are in process 
of change, where the historical standards 
of the church have been comparatively un- 
known, where the dogmatic belief of posi- 
tive Christianity goes no further back than 
the Reformation, where a present working 
organization is counted for what it is rather 
than for its lineage of authority, where the 
demand is that simplicity of belief and 
organization shall be the distinguishing 



The Church in the Nation. 173 

features of church life and creed, it is as 
if the antecedents of Christianity had been 
swept away, and all the magnificent contri- 
butions of its ages of contact with human- 
ity had been ignored. In European coun- 
tries the Roman or the Anglican or the 
Greek churches have been maintained for 
centuries in different nationalities, and 
have guided society essentially upon a 
basis of fixed ecclesiastical institutions, so 
that the work of Christian organization 
and of moral direction in this case have 
proceeded largely through traditional chan- 
nels. In this country our traditions at the 
best do not go back further than two hun- 
dred and fifty years ; to a large extent the 
fixedness of our leading religious bodies 
can be traced no further than a hundred 
years ; and the free development of reli- 
gious life in American organizations is, so 
to speak, the work of yesterday. Even so 
late as a quarter of a century ago, the as- 
sertion of the integrity of the apostolic 
succession, and the claim that it secured 



1J4 The Church in Modern Society. 

the wholeness and continuity of the Chris- 
tian Church as a divine institution, awak- 
ened the hostility of those who do not 
stand by the historical order. It is only 
within a very short space of time that 
this permanent factor in ecclesiastical life 
has come to be understood on its merits as 
a fundamental fact in church organization. 
It was felt that the ecclesiastical order 
of experiment, crystallized into Protestant 
forms in America, had in it the elements 
of finality. To-day this confidence in the 
authority of Protestant religious organiza- 
tions is slowly disappearing ; and there is 
going with it a constant elimination of the 
special theological dogmas of which it 
was the affirmation. All the churches in 
America are to-day voluntary and are mov- 
ing out where they begin to treat men and 
creeds and even the Bible in freedom. It 
is not simply that the church-leaders re- 
fuse to pronounce anathemas upon all who 
do not belong to their religious society ; 
even the dogmatic affirmation is not to-day 



The Church in the Nation. ij$ 

asserted as if it were the final word in reli- 
gion. There has passed over the church a 
widening of view like that which has passed 
over the interpretation of the constitution 
of the nation. Our political institutions 
have received a fresh interpretation in the 
hundred years of their existence, and yet 
we are under the same government. All 
ecclesiastical bodies and institutions have 
likewise received a fresh interpretation, 
and yet each religious organization still 
maintains its own order and works essen- 
tially upon its own lines. Not only this, 
but the solidarity of American religion 
finds expression to-day in the body of the 
churchpeople rather than in the ministry 
which directs and instructs them. The 
laity have always in Protestant churches 
been the controlling force ; in Episcopal 
churches they have divided that honor 
with the clergy ; in Roman Catholic 
churches the laity have only just begun 
to assert their claim to the management of 
the temporalities of the church. Once the 



ij6 The Church in Modern Society. 

clergy held the authority, but to-day and 
for the future, at least wherever demo- 
cratic institutions prevail, the laity will 
maintain a position of coordinate authority 
with the clergy in the direction of eccle- 
siastical affairs. The individual in Ameri- 
can religion has been too conscious of his 
position, and the collective interests of 
civil society have been too little regarded. 
The whole church has been too individual 
and personal in its methods of work. It 
has shown too little comprehensiveness in 
its attitude toward the interests of soci- 
ety. It has sought to make the disciple 
rather than to fit the disciple for the King- 
dom of God. It has worked too little by 
institutions and too much by the single 
man. Its insularity rather than the inclu- 
sive and organizing instinct has been its 
characteristic note, so that to-day, to a very 
large extent, the interests which are dis- 
tinctly Christian in civil society, and in 
which Christianity finds its sphere and free- 
dom for active work in behalf of humanity, 



The Church in the Nation. ijj 

are so largely without the church limits 
that a Christian man or woman must seem- 
ingly go outside the church in order to 
come up to the full discharge of Christian 
duty according to the opportunity offered 
in common life. It is here that American 
religion has been checked in its develop- 
ment. Its field has been too restricted, 
and the present confession of Christian 
leaders is that the sphere in which the col- 
lective church works must be broadened 
until it includes influences which reach the 
whole of civil society. 

It will be seen from this point of view 
that the church needs to be saved to-day 
from a too exclusive and too restricted 
service in a free country. It abides in 
the use of methods whose utility has been 
exhausted, and whose effect is to stultify 
the intelligence of Christian people. There 
is a tendency to simple individualism in 
church methods, as there is a tendency to 
a similar individualism in political meth- 
ods ; and, in a country democratic alike 



ij8 The Church in Modern Society. 

in church and in state, there is a rule of 
mediocrity which dampens the enthusiasm 
and obscures the hopes and ideals, whether 
of the church or of the state, which lift 
men into the higher walks and aims of life. 
The commonness and vulgarity, the ab- 
sence of lead and the constant return to the 
point of start, in our American religion, 
are its great drawbacks. The attempt is 
made in politics with some degree of suc- 
cess to rally around great working princi- 
ples. The same effort must be made in the 
collective church if religion as authorized 
in the gospel of Jesus Christ is to be fresh 
and vital in the minds and hearts of men. 
There is a power in a multitude which is 
not in the individual ; there is a power in 
the denomination which, behind the leader, 
makes him its spokesman and gives him 
authority ; there is a power in the collec- 
tive church when it works in directions 
which gather up the interests of the com- 
munity and deals with them from a cen- 
tral point of view ; there is a power in our 



The Church in the Nation. iyg 

Christianity in this country when it is re- 
garded as the development of a few central 
principles, and people, burning with the 
desire to realize the life of the Son of God 
in the minds and hearts of men, undertake 
to direct the life of the whole community 
upon this simple yet comprehensive basis. 
The defect of American Christianity lies 
in its individualism, in its hand-to-hand 
methods, in the narrowness of its religious 
beliefs, and in its slight grasp of the cen- 
tral truth of the Incarnation. It has not 
been broad enough to meet the demands 
of civil society ; it has not had an organiz- 
ing influence through institutions upon the 
whole of life ; it has not connected large- 
ness of individual method with the springs 
of power which lie in a concrete, compre- 
hensive purpose ; it has failed to empha- 
size the authority, the vitality, the inspira- 
tion which historical Christianity, from the 
very nature of the case, communicates as 
a corrective, as a guide, and as an impulse, 
to the movements of civil society. In 



180 The Church in Modern Society. 

many respects the American Church has 
been an inspiration to the American peo- 
ple, but it has always been directed and 
advanced upon a plane that is below its 
catholic inheritance and short of a proper 
realization of its power. In its own field of 
activity it has been inferior to the organi- 
zation of the political life of the nation. 
Its one chief defect has been that it has 
refused to see in the whole of modern so- 
ciety its proper sphere of action, and has 
not worked in this field with the institu- 
tional authority which produces the largest 
and most permanent results. 



CHAPTER XL 

Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 

nrHE evils that grow out of divided 
-*■ religious work are everywhere felt. 
The rivalry of churches, their competition 
for membership, and the worldly side of 
religious life are the witnesses of a wrong 
method, and where these features are most 
pronounced the spiritual interest is largely 
lost sight of. The question which presses 
with solemn earnestness upon every can- 
did Christian mind is whether unity of 
action can be reached in the Protestant 
bodies. The Protestant idea is the sepa- 
rateness of the individual ; the Catholic 
idea is unity on the basis of the Incarna- 
tion ; and between these two intervene the 
affirmations of an historical experiment 
which has been continued through three 
centuries. Originally a protest against 



1 82 The Church in Modern Society. 

the Church of Rome, the Protestant move- 
ment in modern society has been both po- 
litical and religious, and has been mainly 
identified with individual liberty and the 
growth of civil society. Protestantism is 
not, at least on its civil and political side, 
the negative movement which the Roman 
Catholic insists that it is. It is a large 
and positive factor in the affirmations of 
spiritual truth which have been wrought out 
by the Protestant Church in contact with 
society. The world could never willingly 
go back to the old order when the Roman 
Church had control of western Europe, 
and no reconstruction of churches is pos- 
sible which does not recognize the gains 
which have come as much through the 
spiritual affirmations of the church as 
through the civil affirmations of the peo- 
ple in modern life. It is an oversight to 
think, from the Roman Catholic side, that 
the dial of human progress can be turned 
backward through this whole period, and 
the Papal Syllabus of 1864, which de- 



Constructive Unity in Religions Forces. 183 

nounced the principles on which social life 
is now organized, indicated very distinctly 
that in any possible reconstruction of the 
Christian order, the Roman Church could 
have no immediate part. By its consent 
to that document it took itself out of the 
field, and yet, in the larger view of Chris- 
tian unity upon an organic basis, the 
Church of Rome must be included as a 
factor. The weakness of the Protestant 
churches is that their working methods do 
not carry out properly the spiritual ideas 
which they communicate as factors in re- 
ligion and society. The imperfect organ- 
ization of these religious bodies imparts 
to them but little power to give weight 
to their principles. Each of the different 
societies, affirming something which, at 
the time of its organization, had dropped 
out of the current life in the religious 
community from which it sprang, has left 
out something in its attempts at organic 
development which has impaired or limited 
its distinct affirmations, and should have 



184 The Church in Modern Society. 

been its complement in the effort to reach 
the whole of human life. No one likes to 
say that the different religious organiza- 
tions which are familiar to us are not 
Christian in their character and in their 
influence ; we have no right to think that 
they are not ; but there is something lack- 
ing in them to the extent that no one of 
them could be taken separately as furnish- 
ing the proper basis of a catholic or uni- 
versal Church. The Universalists have as 
their principal tenet the salvation of all 
mankind in Christ, but this affirmation is 
not supported by the complementary the- 
ological truth which makes a good working 
church. The Baptists claim recognition 
for devotion and sincerity, but the stress 
which they put upon the mode of baptism 
is greater than that which they put upon 
other essentials in the Christian life, and 
the result is a one-sided spiritual develop- 
ment in which important factors of Chris- 
tianity are omitted. The Unitarians came 
out of the Congregationalists in protest 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 185 

against a too arbitrary conception of Christ 
as the Son of God, but in affirming our 
Lord's humanity they have left out that 
complementary truth which makes him the 
Saviour of mankind. The Presbyterians 
have crystallized their faith around certain 
religious dogmas which are both affirmed 
and denied in the Holy Scriptures, and 
which stand in the way of that simple 
faith in Christ by which the world is to 
be transformed into the Kingdom of God. 
The Congregationalists, who represent the 
democracy of the Christian world, have 
stood for the independence of the local 
church, which is a truth of the first impor- 
tance, but they have presented Christianity, 
to use the words of the late Dr. Leonard 
Bacon, " as a string of onions without the 
string." The Methodists have organized 
a system of religious activity which has 
great and deserved merits, but they have 
put the whole stress of the working church 
upon a system of emotional religion which 
does not of itself build up the mental and 



i86 The Church in Modern Society. 

spiritual life into a reasonable Christian 
faith. The Swedenborgians, emphasizing 
the church in a new form, have insisted upon 
universal morality with a stress greater 
than that to be found elsewhere, but they 
have left out of their work the vital prin- 
ciple of divine grace. Each of these reli- 
gious bodies emphasizes a truth so impor- 
tant that their witness cannot be dispensed 
with, but each one endeavors to build, so to 
speak, upon a single point, the superstruc- 
ture of a complete working church. It is 
plain that each principle or truth here 
enunciated has its place in a larger system, 
but in the absence of its complementary 
truths, which are supplied where the cath- 
olic faith is taught, there is the danger of 
excess, misleading, misunderstanding, to 
the confusion of Christian ideas; and the 
result must be more or less manifested in 
the misdirection of the Christian life. The 
Anglican Church in its American growths 
is based upon the fundamental principle of 
historical continuity and the recognition 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. i8y 

of the institutional character of Christian- 
ity, but, as it has been mainly developed in 
this country, it has quite too little taken 
the Catholic position to which it is en- 
titled. It is only here and there that its 
development has answered to its inherent 
character. It supplies the basis by which 
Protestantism may escape from its insular- 
ity and rise to the comprehensiveness and 
freedom which are demanded of the Chris- 
tian religion in a great democratic country 
like our own ; but it can never expand to 
a dominating position or meet the demands 
of a work like this, without the coopera- 
tion of every religious body in America 
which maintains any vital principle of 
Christianity, and by virtue of that princi- 
ple is entitled to fellowship in the King- 
dom of God. 

The point is here reached toward which 
we are struggling with almost insuperable 
difficulty. All our religious bodies are in- 
trenched in organizations which have their 
roots in society and are hedged in by pre- 



1 88 The Church in Modern Society. 

judices and factions which give them, to a 
great extent, the vis inertiae. They repre- 
sent the water of the inland lake as con- 
trasted with the water of the ocean. The 
still level of the one is quite out of the 
reach of the constant struggle and free- 
dom of the other. If the forces of modern 
Christianity are to be brought to bear upon 
society to-day, and are to be employed to 
their full extent in its regeneration, some- 
thing more must be done than is accom- 
plished by the present operation of different 
denominations, however vigorously some 
of them may be administered. Two things 
are needed — organic breadth and greater 
freedom of action. The church must be 
as broad and inclusive as the whole of the 
society which it is intended to influence, 
and its methods must be allowed the free- 
dom in local action which is demanded by 
the character and circumstances of the peo- 
ple who are to be influenced. None of the 
purely Protestant denominations furnishes 
the basis on which the whole community 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. i8g 

can be reached. Each addresses a class, 
but does not influence the- whole of so- 
ciety. The Church of Rome to-day in the 
United States, though able to reach all 
classes, chiefly addresses its own followers. 
The Anglican Church has emerged from 
comparative seclusion into competition with 
the great denominations whose career was 
well begun when its own future seemed 
uncertain ; but if this communion has 
waited, like the tortoise, to catch up with 
Achilles, it has waited to some purpose, 
and its position to-day as the historical 
channel of Christianity to the English- 
speaking people is of grave importance. 
In numbers or enthusiasm, or in actual 
agencies of work, it is easily surpassed by 
other organizations, and it has never yet 
reached in any large way the virile popu- 
lation that constitutes the bulk of the 
American people ; but in its place as a 
channel of historical and institutional 
Christianity to the English-speaking peo- 
ple it occupies a unique position. Le 



igo The Church in Modern Society. 

Maistre has said that the Anglican Church 
has a divine office to perform in modern 
religious life. It might do for Protestant 
people what the Church of Rome has de- 
clined to do. It might furnish for the dis- 
membered fragments of Protestant Chris- 
tianity a rallying point by which their 
tendency to individualism could be ar- 
rested, and by which historical Christian- 
ity, with all its conservative strength of 
influence, could be applied to the broaden- 
ing and strengthening of the religious life 
of modern times. This was said with ref- 
erence to the place of the Church of Eng- 
land in modern Europe. It may be said 
with essentially the same truthfulness in 
regard to the reaching of constructive 
unity among the religious forces of the 
United States. 

In this country the Anglican Church 
is an institution as broad as the state, 
and it regards society with as inclusive a 
purpose as the state regards it. It main- 
tains the continuous order of the ministry, 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces, igi 

the great Christian traditions, the Christian 
sacraments, and the idea of the church 
as the extension of the Incarnation of 
Jesus Christ throughout the world. Local 
as it may seem in its work, stripped of 
whatever may seem adventitious in a state 
church, it has the same institutional prin- 
ciple and the same constructive way of 
looking at the community as a whole 
which has been the characteristic of the 
Church of England since its first dealing 
with the English people. It stands on 
the principle of transmitting and protect- 
ing and applying the essential principles 
of Christianity to human society under 
the operation of the laws of common life. 
Its principles are unchanging, but the 
interpretation of its dogmas may change 
from age to age, and its methods are con- 
formable to the demands of the field where 
its work lies. What the Anglican Church 
stands for in its larger operation is that 
it so organizes Christian people in civil 
society that they work freely under its 



ig2 The Church in Modern Society. 

inspiration and guidance till it becomes a 
proper leavening power in Christian civili- 
zation. Wherever this communion has 
worked freely and constructively under its 
normal principles of action, it has accom- 
plished two things. It has inspired the com- 
munity as a whole with a higher purpose, 
and it has maintained among men the 
principle of personal responsibility to God. 
The principal thing to be thought of is 
that the episcopal organization, when ap- 
plied to the ordering and development of 
Christian life, is here what it was in the 
early church. It is a regulative principle. 
It approaches society as a whole. It sees 
the community in the light of the Incar- 
nation, and it organizes Christian society 
in such a way that the light of the Incar- 
nation is diffused through the community 
at large, at the same time that it is di- 
rected to the individual mind and heart. 
In other words, the episcopal organization, 
regarded simply from the institutional 
point of view, provides for the freedom 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 193 

and variety of method by which the whole 
of society may be reached and directed as 
if the sole aim and purpose of its members 
were to become inheritors of the kingdom 
of heaven. 

This view has been very ably set forth 
by Dr. James Martineau in England. It 
is that the Church of England can, without 
changing its standards, so extend its prac- 
tical operation by the principle of inclusion 
that all existing Christian life and move- 
ment shall find its rightful place within 
the national church. There are many 
practical difficulties, even in England, in 
the acceptance of such a comprehensive 
principle ; but if Christian statesmanship 
is ever to be put in the place of ecclesiasti- 
cal management, and the practice of right- 
eousness is to be regarded as important 
as Tightness of belief, it is the way out of 
present difficulties which seems most rea- 
sonable and along which the difficulties 
may disappear as the good of society be- 
comes more and more the aim and the 



194 The Church in Modern Society. 

end of the working Christian Church. 
The opposition to the institutional idea 
of religion, which is the large way of 
stating the principle of episcopal organi- 
zation, is too often the fruit of a small 
jealousy, as if the episcopal clergy, by 
virtue of their regular orders, cast con- 
tempt upon the authority of those who 
minister in other religious societies. It 
is cruel to draw this inference ; it is not 
fair to the facts of the case ; the work 
before Christian men in America to-day, 
under whatever name or order they may 
be associated, is too serious for this small 
jealousy. No one who has given this sub- 
ject proper attention has the least desire 
to undervalue the integrity of the work 
which any Christian minister is doing, 
whatever may be his authority. It is not 
in this way that constructive unity is to 
be reached. The point before one is that 
a working principle must be adopted which 
is sufficiently comprehensive to organize 
the church so that it shall reach the whole 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 195 

of society, while the freedom of the local 
church shall be fully protected and main- 
tained. This principle was adopted by 
the apostles, not more for the sake of 
maintaining the historical succession by 
the laying on of hands than for the dealing 
with society in such a way that the church 
could do its work most efficiently. The 
recognition of this principle is far more 
important to-day than it was in the early 
church, because the multiplicity of life to- 
day is greater, and the application of Chris- 
tian truth to social conditions is infinitely 
more diverse. 

Working freely under a large central 
organization seems to be the only way 
in which the whole of society may be 
brought under the control of the Church 
of Christ. What is wanted is not the 
denial of the rights of existing churches, 
but such an organization, like that of the 
associated charities in London or Boston, 
that the existing institutions of religion 
shall properly assist one another in cover- 



ig6 The Church in Modern Society. 

ing the field where they exist, and in doing 
their work for the glory of God and the 
benefit of our kind. When the American 
House of Bishops issued their famous dec- 
laration of 1886, in which they acknowl- 
edged four principles to be essential to 
constructive unity, and in which they 
affirm the integrity of the episcopal or- 
ganization to be something which must 
be at the bottom of any effective unity 
among Protestant Christians, they acted, 
not with the thought of increasing the 
influence of the Episcopal Church, but 
under the conviction that the proper or- 
ganization of Christian society could alone 
be reached by the adoption of this prin- 
ciple. How it could be adapted to exist- 
ing circumstances it was not for them at 
that time to suggest ; but it was the part 
of a wise Christian statesmanship to ad- 
vance this affirmation, and to rise to the 
conception of the whole of American 
Christianity under the control of a prin- 
ciple which, broad in its practical opera- 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces, igj 

tion, would recognize the position of each 
congregation as distinctly and protect its 
rights as faithfully as they are guarded 
under its present ecclesiastical direction, 
reducing the competition that hindered or 
affected its action, and directing the work- 
ing of the parish to broader and better 
aims, while giving to the pastors such es- 
sential authority, not of a denomination, 
but of the undivided Church of Christ, 
that in every city and town and village 
and hamlet throughout the country the 
work of Christ would go forward " in unity 
of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in 
righteousness of life." The severest con- 
demnation of the church to-day is found 
in its actual operation, in the city, town, 
and even the country village. It repre- 
sents the waste, the confusion, and often 
the destruction of Christian effort amid 
the rivalries of passing factions which 
claim to represent the Church of Christ, 
causing people of the world to stand aside 
and exclaim, not as the heathen did in the 



/ g8 The Church in Modern Society. 

apostolic clays, " How these Christians love 
one another ; " but " How effectually these 
Christian organizations defeat the work 
of the Christ whom they claim to serve." 

The adoption of the regulative principle 
which is here suggested as the proper 
basis of constructive unity involves so 
much of detail and implies so great a 
willingness on the part of all Christian 
organizations to put aside their denials, 
and not only stand by their affirmations 
but accept the affirmations of others, that 
it seems as if the millennium might come 
before the result here suggested is reached ; 
but if the organized life of the denomina- 
tion is disregarded and the feelings and 
convictions of Christian people at large 
are consulted, it will be found that Chris- 
tian society is ripe almost beyond be- 
lief for such a consummation as is here 
outlined. Doctrinal distinctions to-clay 
are losing their weight in the desire to 
bring men to Christ by practical methods. 
The piety of the hour is the substitution 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces, igg 

of charity for self-will. Every pastor in 
our cities and towns and villages finds that 
his work counts for more in the com- 
munity, that the work of the salvation of 
men is more easily accomplished, and that 
the improvement of society is more easily 
secured, in proportion to his readiness to 
work with other pastors for the attainment 
of a common purpose. The differences 
between the religious societies are inap- 
preciable when compared with the untold 
opportunities for the amelioration of hu- 
man life and the building up of religious 
character which are open to those who are 
willing to improve them. There is an 
earnestness and a yearning and an appeal 
alike of the heart and of the head, greater 
than has before been witnessed, for a new 
construction of Christian society. The 
barriers of denominational life seem like 
an obstacle in the way of the larger unity 
of practical Christian effort which is de- 
sirable ; and yet no result that will stand 
for the next generation and can be re- 



200 The Church in Modern Society. 

garded as fundamental and permanent, can 
be reached in which the good common 
sense of the secular world does not sustain 
the spiritual hopes and aspirations of the 
people of God. 

The work here outlined is not to be done 
in a day, but it is the distinct religious 
want of our time. The organization of all 
our churches upon a basis of unity in essen- 
tials which will make their common work 
practicable is the constant prayer of all 
Christians ; and it is more and more possi- 
ble as each day reveals the spiritual draw- 
ing together of those who think and feel 
alike in these things. Only the ecclesi- 
astical officials and the sectarian organi- 
zations which support them stand in the 
way of this coming together. The Epis- 
copal Church, though it may contribute 
a vital element to the reconstruction of 
modern Christianity, has itself to learn a 
lesson from its associated organizations 
in this country. The churches are like 
the individuals addressed by St. Paul in 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 201 

his Epistle to the Romans. They are 
members one of another, and to use St. 
Paul's words, ought to say : " Having gifts 
differing according to the grace that was 
given to us, whether prophecy, let us 
prophesy according to the proportion of 
our faith ; or ministry, let us give ourselves 
to our ministry ; or he that teacheth, to 
his teaching ; or he that exhorteth, to his 
exhorting : he that giveth, let him do it 
with liberality ; he that ruleth, with dili- 
gence ; he that sheweth mercy, with cheer- 
fulness. Let love be without hypocrisy. 
Abhor that which is evil ; cleave to that 
which is good. In love of the brethren 
be tenderly affectioned to one another ; in 
honor preferring one another ; in diligence 
not slothful ; fervent in spirit ; serving the 
Lord ; rejoicing in hope ; patient in tribu- 
lation ; continuing steadfastly in prayer ; 
communicating to the necessities of the 
saints ; given to hospitality/ ' This is a 
solution in which the whole of civil society 
may be brought under the constructive 



202 The Church in Modern Society. 

direction of the Church of Christ, and in 
which its entire strength may be applied 
to the incarnation of spiritual life in the 
souls of men, for an avoidance of the 
present waste and confusion of Christian 
effort. Federation, with concessions all 
around to the principle of institutional 
order here enunciated, joined to the rising 
to Christian statesmanship, the seeing eye 
to eye, and the willingness to overcome 
self-will alike in the individual and in the 
ecclesiastical body, is the immediate step 
towards constructive unity. 



Dr. Briggs, who is a distinguished Broad 
Churchman among Presbyterians, has writ- 
ten an important book, 1 in which he aims 
to show what the drift of Protestantism 
has been during the last two centuries, 
especially how far the American Presby- 
terian Church has departed from the 

1 Whither? A Theological Question for the Times, 
By Charles Augustus Briggs, D. D. 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 203 

Puritan theology of the Westminster con- 
fession, and how far a similar departure 
has been reached in the other Protestant 
bodies of the United States. Probably 
no other theologian, unless it were Dr. 
Fisher of New Haven, could be named 
who has made so thorough a study of this 
subject as Dr. Briggs has, and his work 
deserves attention, because it treats with 
authority a subject on which it is impor- 
tant to have something more than vague 
impressions to guide one. Persons who 
follow religious opinion in New England 
are quite conscious of the whither of its 
religious movements, but are not able to 
speak for the Presbyterian and the Re- 
formed churches in other parts of the 
country. What is to be noted in them 
all is that they have unconsciously drifted 
from their old standards, and are moving 
forward toward a less dogmatic and more 
comprehensive statement of religious be- 
liefs. 

The details of this movement are well 



204 The Church in Modern Society. 

stated by Dr. Briggs from the strictly the- 
ological point of view. In the first two 
and the last two chapters of his work he 
breaks away from his Presbyterian limi- 
tations, and looks upon the entire Chris- 
tian Church in this country in its whole- 
ness and in its unity, and his book is 
symptomatic of the feeling and thought 
which pervade every Christian community. 
Without proposing a method, Dr. Briggs 
takes such a survey of the existing reli- 
gious bodies, that, from his point of view, 
it would not be difficult to show the feasi- 
bility of a movement for unity which would 
in a short time reduce the ecclesiastical 
conflicts in the American churches to a 
minimum and bring about substantial 
unity in their methods of operation. He 
shows that the drift of all these com- 
munions is away from those features which 
constitute their difference from one another 
and toward the opinions which they hold 
in common. In matters of doctrine near- 
ly all of them are broadening their faith. 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 205 

The Puritan view of the atonement is 
passing away ; the Calvinistic decrees are 
no longer set forth ; the verbal inspiration 
of the Bible is mainly a belief of the past, 
and the substantial facts won by the higher 
criticism will soon be commonly received ; 
the old doctrine about the last things is 
fleeing away like the darkness before sun- 
rise, and is being replaced everywhere by a 
broader and better statement of religious 
opinion concerning the future life. This is 
the gain in the theological world, and this 
is the summary of what Dr. Briggs sets 
forth in his timely and significant volume. 

There is another side to this matter, to 
which Dr. Briggs gives less attention. In 
his chapter on " Barriers " he lays down 
some of the difficulties which now stand 
in the way of Christian union. The first 
is the insistence on submission to a central 
ecclesiastical authority claiming the divine 
right of government. The second has 
been the subscription to elaborate creeds. 
The third is the insistence upon uniformity 



206 The Church in Modern Society. 

of worship. The fourth is the barrier of 
traditionalism, the set-back of organiza- 
tions. All these barriers have been raised 
by existing sections of the Christian world, 
and at the present time they are all more 
or less broken down. If Christian union 
were actually set about, it is believed that 
the Roman Church, as well as the English, 
would contrive some way by which the Prot- 
estant ministry could be legitimated with- 
out accepting all that is implied in the 
supremacy of the Pope or in the apostoli- 
cal succession. The Protestant churches 
are already willing to recede from their 
elaborate creeds. The Church of Eng- 
land would not do to-day what it did in 
1662, because the Puritan party then de- 
manded greater freedom in worship. The 
difficulties that grow out of the formal 
ecclesiasticism of Christian bodies are not 
insuperable, and would easily disappear if 
any one of them should have the courage 
of its convictions and make a clean breast 
of its weakness in isolation from the whole 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 20 y 

church. The American bishops at Chicago 
in 1886 almost touched this point of reli- 
gious heroism in their famous declaration, 
as Dr. Briggs is at pains to show. The 
whole issue to-day is like a game of chess. 
All parties are ready, or nearly ready, for 
a central move, and are restrained from 
action because each one is afraid to con- 
fess its own sins in the face of the Chris- 
tian world. 

This is the upshot of the treatment of 
religious movement in which Dr. Briggs 
expresses his sense of what is now possi- 
ble in our Christian societies. 1 He does 

1 The following passages from his volume show that 
he is fully aware of the demands of constructive unity : 
" If there is anything in a national religion and the unity 
of the Church of Jesus Christ, it is high time that Ameri- 
can Protestantism should rise to the situation, grasp the 
problem, and endeavor to solve it. The ideals of Chris- 
tian unity and a national religion are rising into greater 
prominence in American Christianity," (page 168.) In 
his preface he says : " The barriers between the Prot- 
estant denominations should be removed and an organic 
union formed. An alliance should be made between 
Protestantism and Romanism and all other branches of 



2o8 The Church in Modern Society. 

not so much formulate the plan as state 
the terms on all sides which would enter 
into the shaping of such a plan. This is 
modesty, indeed ; but there is one feature 
which he conspicuously overlooks, though 
he comes very near to stating it. It is 
practically that the liberty of action which 
he seeks in a comprehensive unity of the 
different American churches cannot be 
reached without a system of federation or 
organic unity, or comprehensive direction, 
which comes from a central administration. 
It is here that the halt is most decided. 
The question is whether the liberty and 
freedom which are essentials in the Amer- 
ican Protestant churches can be met by 
such an enlargement in methods of prac- 
tical government on the part of the Roman 
or Anglican churches as would secure to 

Christendom. The Lambeth Conference, in its pro- 
posals for Christian unity, points in the right direction. 
The Church of England is entitled to lead. Let all 
others follow her lead and advance steadily toward 
Christian Unity," (page xi.) 



Constructive Unity in Religious Forces. 209 

the Protestant bodies their proper develop- 
ment as institutions without impairing the 
independence and freedom to which they 
are accustomed. The case is as broad as 
it is long, and the question of Christian 
unity lies here as in a nutshell. A more 
practical conception of what Christianity 
is in modern life, and what it has wrought, 
is needed by both the Roman and the An- 
glican communions before they can take 
the organic weakness out of the Protestant 
churches ; and the conviction, that the 
freedom of the individual, valuable as it 
is in the Protestant churches, reaches its 
best results under wise direction, must be 
far more universal than it is now, if any 
such spiritual leadership is consented to 
in a large way. The problem in the church 
is like the problem between capital and 
labor in the field of industry, or the prob- 
lem in modern civilization, which is to 
bring into working harmony the upper and 
the under forces which are the natural 
complement of one another. 



CHAPTER XII. 

Unity through Working Agreements. 

* I ^HERE are two ways of studying 
-■"' Christian unity at the present time. 
One is the analytical, in which the exist- 
ing condition of ecclesiastical society is 
considered, with the effort to make such 
an analysis of the creeds of churches and 
such an estimate of their agreements that 
the work of practical unity may at once 
begin. The other is the synthetic pro- 
cess, in which the present ecclesiastical 
societies are not disturbed, but are treated 
as the factors of a more comprehensive 
view of the relation of the Christian to the 
secular world. The analytical treatment 
brings one at once against the snags of 
deep-rooted controversies, and the hope of 
a solution of the problem of a restored unity 
is lost amid the traditional differences 



Unify through Working Agreements. 211 

which now form bars of separation. If 
you trace these differences to their origin, 
you discover that they grew out of the 
variations of allowable opinions which in 
many instances have been precipitated 
into dogmas that hold the hearts of Chris- 
tian people within hard and fast lines. 
They now have the character of an origi- 
nal part of Christianity, and, like the bar- 
nacles that have grown on the sides of a 
ship, are not easily removed. There is 
little hope of relief from the schisms of 
Christendom in this direction. The only 
unity to which men can turn is the unity 
of spiritual agreements. If Christianity is 
ever to be the leaven of our civilization, 
in the sense in which it was the leaven 
of society in the brightest days of the 
Holy Roman Empire, it must be a larger 
factor in the direction of life than it is 
now. The Holy Roman Catholic Church 
in the Holy Roman Empire has slowly 
faded away till it is only the remembrance 
of a splendid ideal of the relations of 



212 The Church in Modern Society. 

church and state which was never fully 
realized. It is impossible to realize it 
to-day. The men who build castles in the 
air may work a long time to harmonize 
the Roman, the Greek, the Anglican, and 
the Protestant churches so that they shall 
be of one mind, but they have grown too 
far apart and have their roots too far back 
in the history of the race easily to retrace 
their steps and work together as one fold 
under one shepherd. The ecclesiastical 
structure which is to be built out of their 
mutual concessions in outward forms is 
not likely soon to be raised. Another 
point of view must be taken if society 
is to derive large benefit from Christianity, 
and its great compulsions are to be better 
realized among men. 

The unity that is within reach in this 
world is an ethical and a spiritual unity, 
not a unity that addresses the outward 
eye and dwells in a temple made by hands. 
It is as difficult for Christian people to 
conceive of unity after this kind as it was 



Unify through Working Agreements. 21 3 

for the Jews to believe that the Prince of 
the House of David was the lowly Naza- 
rene, the Son of Mary. The main reason 
why this outward unity is not soon to be 
realized is that the recognition of the per- 
sonal element in modern life renders it 
seemingly impossible. The conception of 
Christianity which obtained in the early 
Christian ages, and which is the dominant 
idea in the Roman Church, has already 
attended its own funeral. It is the regal 
idea, the belief that the individual withers 
and that the world is governed by insti- 
tutions in which the will of man disappears 
as a personal force. The regal idea has 
its place in the church ; the realization 
of Christianity in modern society apart 
from institutions which organize life into 
collective power is like trying to make a 
rope of sand ; and yet nothing is accom- 
plished to-day which does not take into 
account the part which the individual plays 
as a member of the community. The men 
who belonged to Caesar's household in the 



214 The Church in Modern Society. 

early church and the men who believe in 
Christianity to-day with certain reserves 
of agnosticism see life from almost oppo- 
site points of view, and no advance to- 
wards Christian unity can be made which 
does not take this difference of position 
into account. The church is still an in- 
stitution and acts upon society most be- 
neficently in its institutional character, 
but it is composed of persons who have 
been trained in the atmosphere of modern 
life and who are able to do their own 
thinking. The element of authority and 
the element of free thought and individual 
responsibility dwell in the same mind and 
heart. They have to be harmonized in the 
individual. 

This is the task which presents itself to 
the modern state as truly as to the modern 
church. The nation to-day imparts its 
strength to the people and gives them 
political unity, but it returns only what it 
receives from them, though it is returned 
not in individual influence but in collec- 



Unity through Working Agreements. 215 

tive power. The church to-day is in one 
sense nothing more than a collection of 
people who stand up to be counted as the 
kingdom of God in the world, but what 
it is as an organized body, with its tradi- 
tions and its inheritance of Christian or- 
ganizations, is something vastly different 
from what it is to the individual believer. 
The individual has his place in both politi- 
cal and religious society, but the individual 
alone is not the nation or the church. And 
yet in all our plans of life the individual 
factor is taken into account, and nothing 
is accomplished until the individual will, 
in its collective form, is behind it. Author- 
ity and reason are the two poles between 
which the electrical forces of the will are 
in constant play. Authority in the church 
is a great factor, but it no longer has 
dominion over the individual ; and, on the 
other hand, reason alone is inadequate to 
maintain the conservative and constructive 
forces of religion. The two go hand in 
hand in our best modern life. In all that 



2i 6 The Church in Modern Society. 

belongs to the future of ihe Christian 
church there are and will be these two 
factors, authority and right reason. They 
cannot be separated, and in any changes 
that are yet to take place they are the 
factors that cannot be overlooked. The 
difficulty of realizing Christian unity is 
that in outward forms one party insists 
upon the surrender of the reason to author- 
ity, while the other insists upon the ab- 
solute authority of reason. The situation 
is such that formal unity is reached only 
after such a change has passed over the 
active religious life of the world as we 
have no right to expect. The earlier Chris- 
tian ages witnessed the domination of the 
church as an institution ; the next step in 
religious evolution was the individual com- 
ing to self-consciousness; the third step 
is to be the union of the two in a larger 
social development. It is institutional 
action, modified by the freedom of the in- 
dividual, which is to mark the future devel- 
opment of the Christian Church. 



Unity through Working Agreements. 21 y 

It is plain that little or nothing is to be 
expected on the ecclesiastical side. The 
power of the church in modern society is 
ethical and spiritual. It is not in a Papal 
Bull ; it is not in a formal creed ; it is not 
necessarily in apostolical succession ; it is 
not in following the letter of Scripture. 
The strict ecclesiastical relations of the 
churches to one another will be for many 
generations chiefly what we see them to- 
day. What the churches are in the way of 
help to society comes mainly from the mag- 
nitude and strength of their agreements. 
In times past they have mostly empha- 
sized their differences, their antagonisms. 
If they should yield to the present desire 
to magnify their agreements, how many 
articles of the Apostles' Creed would be 
denied ? If they should come together on 
the basis of the moral law, how many would 
be without the fold ? If it should be al- 
lowed that the " eternal hope " may be the 
light of those who had no chance in this 
world, what ethical comfort would be given 



218 The Church in Modern Society. 

to those who have been better acquainted 
with the limitations than with the possibil- 
ities of the present life ! If the eternities, 
felt alike in law and conscience, come like 
the shadows of night over every soul with 
solemn import, what sympathy flows like an 
electric current through the lives of men 
most disparate in their moral and spiritual 
character ! When you look at life on its 
ethical and spiritual side there is a wonder- 
ful tenderness of feeling in all men toward 
the humanity of which each one forms a 
part. If we are the moral wreck of God's 
creation, yet what capacities of a God-like 
order still remain ! No man is without in- 
terest to his fellows on the moral and spir- 
itual side. When the Christian churches 
are looked at in their collective strength as 
our established agencies for bringing men 
into the closer service of God, how small 
and insignificant do their differences ap- 
pear ! The organization may be closer to 
the primitive standard in one case than in 
another, but the body is more than the 



Unity through Working Agreements. 219 

raiment, and where the fruits of spirit are 
manifest in Christian character, we are not 
to measure the institutional order of the 
church by too strict a rule. When one 
transfers himself in imagination from this 
planet to a central position where he can 
see the revolutions of all the planetary- 
systems and can obtain a relative view of 
the vast whole, the things peculiar to our 
own planet sink into insignificance ; and 
when men rise above the present factions 
of the universal church and see its opera- 
tion as a comprehensive and yet personal 
force impressing itself on humanity every- 
where, its ethical and spiritual power is 
such that one loses his thought in trying 
to express it in terms of language. It is 
in this higher view, which is as legitimate 
as the purely ecclesiastical view, that there 
are reconciliations which do not appear in 
actual society. The moral and spiritual 
forces are seen in their collective capacity, 
and the vast operations of the tendency 
toward righteousness are taken at their 



220 The Church in Modern Society. 

true value. In this light, the world is bet- 
ter than it seems, and there is a substan- 
tial unity of purpose amid a thousand dis- 
agreements. 

It will be said that this is a broader 
view of the kingdom of heaven on earth 
than the facts will warrant. It is cer- 
tainly the ideal view, but it is not without 
important confirmations. It is an attempt 
to see life in the light of the highest moral 
constructions, and it is only in this way of 
looking at the state of righteousness in 
this world that one can grasp it as a whole. 
There is something in the glib way in 
which ecclesiastical experts size up the dif- 
ferent religious families that is utterly ab- 
horrent to a spiritual mind. But when the 
relations of the various parts of the uni- 
versal church are considered in their prac- 
tical contact with society, it will be seen 
that in the next phase of its development 
the Christian Church must follow lines 
of action that will increase its agreements. 
It has already been intimated that the 



Unity through Working Agreements. 221 

future growth of the Kingdom of God lies 
in the general renewal of society. It is not 
denying its character as a witness to the 
Incarnation, nor its power as the revealer 
of Jesus Christ to men, to insist upon its 
renewing agency in improving the condi- 
tions of modern life. These social changes 
are the evidence that the spiritual King- 
dom of God is becoming coextensive with 
the life of humanity, and that Christ is 
taking the place that belongs to him as its 
head. 

There are two ways in which the col- 
lective church approaches mankind. One 
part of its work is to prepare the individ- 
ual for another world by an act of faith 
on his part and by a spiritual application 
of the efficacy of Christ's death to the 
soul through the sacraments. Through 
faith or through sacraments, or through 
both, the individual finds the church the 
stepping-stone to a renewed life. The 
appeal to the individual is constant ; it is 
here that the church takes Christ's place 



222 The Church in Modern Society, 

and makes its personal efforts in the win- 
ning of souls. But this is not its whole 
work. The church is one of the three 
great institutions of society. It has to do 
with the family and the state. It is a great 
factor in our daily life, and the more thor- 
oughly democratic our civilization becomes 
the more the conservative institutions of 
society are appealed to for an influence 
which was less needed when there was less 
freedom in human relations. The Chris- 
tian communities carry weight as ethical 
and spiritual forces. They have the family 
under their jurisdiction ; they have the edu- 
cation of the young under their charge; 
they are the guardians of public morals ; 
they are monitors of the state in its exer- 
cise of protection, in its view of public 
trusts, in the maintenance of reverence 
and honor and virtue. As one looks at our 
American life to-day, the different denom- 
inations bring to bear upon the congrega- 
tions which belong to them, and through 
them upon the common society of the 



Unity through Working Agreements. 22) 

country, the highest sort of moral and spir- 
itual influence. They give tone and char- 
acter to city and town and village. There 
is no religious society which could well be 
spared. Collectively, this is the mightiest 
influence that exists in the modern world. 
It is seen in the midst of its infirmities ; 
there is hardly a Christian body that comes 
up to its ideal ; but there is in the aggre- 
gate a powerful sympathy between its mem- 
bers and the great commonwealth of souls 
upon whom they act in their capacity as 
fellow-citizens. The peculiarities of the 
religious body are often more noted than 
its structural influence, but when it is re- 
garded as a positive institution it is al- 
ways found to be a centre of ethical 
power. The things that differentiate reli- 
gious people from one another are here 
expressly ignored because they are merely 
hindrances to the positive benefit which 
each denomination communicates to so- 
ciety ; they do not prevent that sum of 
influences in daily life by which the 



224 The Church in Modern Society. 

Christian church blesses and sanctifies the 
world. 

There can be no doubt that, while the 
present opportunities of reaching the in- 
dividual are greater than they ever were 
before, the difficulty of finding the lives 
of people preoccupied with affairs is still 
greater. The old ways of doing religious 
work are not the ways through which the 
people are now best reached. All the 
churches are largely fossilized by clinging 
to statements of doctrine and following 
methods of work which are not in harmony 
with the ethical and spiritual movement 
of the people. There is more activity to- 
day in the churches, but there are also 
more unchurched people than ever before. 
The field widens visibly from day to day. 
You put out your hand and seem to touch 
all mankind. The religious societies are 
constantly reporting openings for mis- 
sionary service which did not exist half a 
century ago. The industrial life of the 
people has so changed that men are more 



Unity through Working Agreements. 225 

open to-day for the institutional study of 
religion than they once were. There is a 
flowing together of the forces which con- 
stitute our civilization. There is the feel- 
ing that the right must triumph, that the 
individual is to divide more with his neigh- 
bor, that the state is to be controlled in 
its moral action by the presence of a 
higher power, and that the family and the 
public school and the political life are parts 
of a great whole out of which each one 
is to draw a greater satisfaction. This is 
often crudely expressed, but it is the under- 
current of thought that runs through the 
nation. There is the consciousness that 
Christianity in its social action is some- 
thing broader, larger, more human and 
more divine than it has yet been under- 
stood to be. There is the conviction that 
the destiny of man on this earth is more 
intimately connected with it than has been 
believed. The conviction grows that the 
Christian Church is entering in the United 
States, and wherever else society is free, 



226 The Church in Modern Society 

upon a practical development along social 
and ethical lines which have not before 
been followed with the vigor that is now 
possible. The strength of this conviction is 
such that the religious body which will not 
work for the highest and broadest interests 
of humanity, as they are distributed in our 
social connections, is held to be untrue to 
the essentials of a Christian Church. It 
has come to be the aim of the great divi- 
sions of the Christian family, though it 
is yet very imperfectly realized, to make 
our life in this world more nearly the pat- 
tern of what human life in its best estate 
ought to be. Ethical and spiritual inter- 
ests have taken a new position in the con- 
ception of what constitutes character and 
what makes happiness. This is felt in 
the reconstructions of theology, and even 
more in the ethical reorganization of so- 
ciety. It is felt in the tumbling down 
of the ecclesiastical barriers which have 
divided one company of Christians from 
another. There is a process going on in 



Unity through Working Agreements. 22j 

the churches analogous to that which is 
felt among the nations. It is everywhere 
understood that the people are the rulers 
to-day ; whatever may be the outward 
form of the government, this is the un- 
varying fact ; and there is growing up be- 
tween governments the consciousness of 
a common life. There is not a day in 
which the press does not record some 
fresh evidence of this change. Govern- 
ments have established international rela- 
tions ; they hold by the things that make 
for peace. This is the order of the world. 
Men are coming to stand upon this po- 
litical platform everywhere. The nations 
are as one nation ; humanity is as one 
man. The commerce between nations, 
the exchanges of thought and courtesy, 
the reciprocity of affection which is the 
outgrowth of the touch of the hand, have 
established new conditions which furnish 
the basis for a higher civilization. What 
has come without observation in the po- 
litical and social, has also come as silently 



228 The Church in Modern Society. 

in the religious world. The leaders of 
the great established churches may stand 
as far apart as the antipodes from one 
another, but they cannot prevent the in- 
crease of practical sympathy between those 
who call God their Father and Christ their 
Saviour. The lines of a broader and better 
religious life have already been laid down 
in our common society. The people are 
a thousand times nearer to one another 
spiritually than their religious leaders 
would have us believe. The heart of the 
Christian Church beats as the heart of one 
man ; it is more than ever — 
" True to the kindred points of heaven and home." 

It is often said, when the church is re- 
garded from this point of view, Why not 
unite at once and work together ? The 
vested interests and traditions of our 
Christian communities prevent this, but 
they do not forbid and cannot prevent 
the meeting of brethren of all names on 
the great free demesne of modern soci- 
ety, where the yet remaining conquests for 



Unity through Working Agreements. 229 

the human race are to be secured. It 
seems almost like a lack of faith to tell 
people to go to work along the lines of 
their affections, instead of first agreeing 
to believe together ; but the heart has as 
much to do with the operation of the 
Christian religion as the head, and where 
the reason interposes difficulties the heart 
sweeps them away with a large broom. It 
is through the channels of cooperation for 
the industrial, social, and personal im- 
provement of our fellow-citizens that we 
are to take steps that lead to the enlarge- 
ment of personal character and bring 
people together in righteousness. It is 
here that the words of the Master come 
true: " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
the least of these my brethren, ye have 
done it unto me." 

Ecclesiastical unity in the Church of 
God in this world may or may not be 
reached in the course of time. It seems 
far oil to-day. It may be, as in so many 
other things where man plans and God 



230 The Church in Modern Society. 

disposes, that the divine realization is to 
be different from what men fondly expect. 
But there are certain lines of action about 
which there can be no dispute. If the 
great denominations of Christendom work 
in the social field where there is a suffi- 
cient call for all their energies and secure 
to us better homes, better schools, better 
laws, better conditions of life, better en- 
vironment for the individual, greater free- 
dom, more healthful action, and the re- 
moval of an increasing number of the nega- 
tions and obstacles that are in the way of 
the free growth of body and soul, there 
will be such growing love toward men 
inspired by such love toward God, that 
all Christians will lose sight of their differ- 
ences in the discovery that their agree- 
ments are the sufficient basis on which 
society in this world can be so organized 
as to have in itself a foretaste of the satis- 
factions of the world to come. 



INDEX. 



Adam, the leader of the family, 2. 
Arnold, Dr., principle of, in 
Rugby School, 151. 

Bishops, Declaration of Ameri- 
can House of, in 1886, 196. 

Briggs, Dr., statement of Pro- 
testant drifts and theological 
positions in his book entitled 
Whither, noticed, 202-209 ; 
his attitude toward unity, 207- 
209. 

Christianity, outside the state 
in its early history, 19, 20; col- 
ored by paganism, 20; perma- 
nent influence of, 65 ; its com- 
prehensive form missed in this 
country, 76 ; a spent force, 81 ; 
special defects in American, 
179; how it can leaven our civ- 
ilization, 211 ; not worth any- 
thing outside of institutions, 

213. 
Church, its growth from the 
family, 1 ; its institutional char- 
acter, 2 ; why it has ruled, 13 ; 
Jewish, a theocracy, 14 ; its 
history, how written, 15 ; its 
sanction ,_ 18 ; how developed 
in America, 33, 35; its defect, 
36; its characteristic in the 
Middle Ages, 38 ; in disintegra- 
tion, 39 how different from 
the state, 50 ; problem before 
it, 52 ; not changed toward so- 
ciety as the state has been, 56, 
57 ; what it^ is to-day, 58 ; its 
ethical relation to the commu- 
nity, 65 ; its successful method, 
66 ; its work and method, 66 ; 
its broader identification with 
life, 68 ; sphere of man's spir- 
itual education, 75; its compre- 
hensiveness, 76; what it has 



to recover, 80; conservator of 
divine movement in the world, 
84 ; its aim and purpose, 85 ; 
its breadth, 86 ; its position in 
modern life, 88; spiritual me- 
thods of, 90-109; related to 
social order, 135, 136; what it 
lacks in the United States, 137, 
138; compared in its methods 
with the state, 139; its place 
as a moral authority, 142; in 
the spiritual guidance of social 
life, 144 ; drawing the masses, 
147-153; development in the 
nation, 159; in America, vol- 
untary and free, 174; methods 
of work too restricted, 177; 
weakness of Protestant church- 
es, 183; what each one lacks, 
185-189; the Anglican, in its 
American growths, 186; what 
it supplies to Protestantism, 
187; the organic breadth and 
freedom needed to-day, 188; 
its distinct office, 190-193 ; the 
working principle of, 194, 195 ; 
what Episcopal, has to learn, 
200; regal idea of, 213; what 
marks its future development, 
216-221 ; growing convictions 
about the American, 225. 
Church, Collective, a combina- 
tion of Christian organizations, 
48; its transitional relation to 
modern society, 54 ; difference 
between its factors in Europe 
and America, 55 ; its place in 
economic and industrial life, 
142 ; what it does for the state, 
165 ; how it approaches man- 
kind, 221. 

Ewald's History of Israel 'brings 
out strongly Jewish theocracy, 
74- 



232 



Index. 



Family, the beginning of social 
order, i ; its part in social in- 
stitutions, 9, 10 ; and church 
among the Jews, 19 ; imper- 
fectly developed to-day, 31; 
how influenced by the church, 
124-133 ; idea of its wholeness 



God, how present in the world, 
69; method of revelation, 71; 
how known in the church, 73; 
his immanence in society, 78. 

Hegel, definition of religion, 156. 

History, its value in tracing the 
growth of institutions, 7, 8 ; 
how it is to be studied in insti- 
tutions, 23, 24. 

Home, the unit of society, 111. 

Incarnation, basis of Catholic 
idea of unity, 181. 

Individual man, his sphere in- 
creased by the Reformation, 
28, 29 ; his growth faster than 
that of institutions, 58 ; what 
the church does for him, 94, 95. 

Institutions, how far divine, 2, 
5 ; their functions, 3 ; their 
place in history, 4, 5 ; difference 
between them and personality, 
62. 

Keblk, his manner at baptism of 
children, 99. 

Laity, what their place is in 

different churches, 175, 176. 
Le Maistre quoted, ic,o. 
Leaders, spiritual, 169, 170. 

Man, origin of, 93. 

Marriage in Europe and Amer- 
ica, 114- 

Martineau. Dr. James, 47 ; his 
view of the Church of England, 

193. 
Modern life, its weakness, 31-37* 
Mulford, Dr., his Nation quot- 
ed, 155-160. 



Nation, its moral character, 161 ; 
relation to spiritual leaders, 
169. 

Potter, Bishop, rebukes politi- 
cal corruption, 170. 

Papal Syllabus of 1864, its ef- 
fect on Christian unity, 1K2. 

Protestantism, not negative in 
civil and political life, 182. 

Reformation, begins the mod- 
ern world, 25 ; opposed to the 
institutional order of society, 
26-30 ; its principle, 34 ; its 
great defect, 35. 

Religion, American, defined by 
John Weiss, 171; its great 
drawbacks, 178; its defect in 
its individualism, 179; too nar- 
row for its field, 180. 

Religion and society, their sep- 
aration historically traced, 41. 

Sacraments, their personal 
value, 102. 

School, place of the public, 10; 
the support of democratic ideas, 
116-124. 

Society, the source of primitive, 
in institutions, 1 ; democratic, 
4; beginning of modern, 11 ; 
civil, its sphere in modern life, 
27 ; church's mission to, not 
yet realized, 58; its need to- 
day, 60; institutional idea of, 
overlooked, 8i, 

State, its relation to family and 
school, 9 ; a moral and spiritual 
organism, 72. 

Unity, Christian, must recognize 
institutional character of Chris- 
tianity, 187; what the Angli- 
can Church contributes to it, 
190-193 ; Dr. Briggs on, 207 ; 
reached through working agree- 
ments, 211; ethical and spir- 
itual in this world, 212 ; formal, 
216; how practically realized 
now, 229, 230. 



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